AUTHOR BRINGS WORLD’S TROUBLES INTO RURAL BUNKER
The authors likely began their respective works before the pandemic hit, but the autumn 2020 fiction season is notable at least in part for works about disasters, whether foreseen or unforeseen. In his recent novel “The Silence,” Don DeLillo offered a typically DeLillian lament about threats to society, this time involving a blackout that invites the book’s characters to engage in paranoid speculation about what else may come.
With his first two novels, “Rich and Pretty” and “That Kind of Mother,” Rumaan Alam has developed a reputation more for thoughtful portrayals of women and race than for predictions about the coming apocalypse. Although no less witty or boldthan his previous works, Mr. Alam’s latest, the American Book Award short-listed “Leave the World Behind,” skirts the edges of horror, at least in its final third, in its depiction of another calamitous blackout and its effect on two families, one white and oneBlack.
Race relations were an integral component of “That
Kind of Mother.” To a lesser extent, race features in this new book, although the topic is overshadowed by the story’s central catastrophe. It all begins when a white family leaves their Brooklyn apartment for a holiday on Long Island in a remote brick house on a gravel road with a hedgerow and white picket fence out front, “not a trace of irony in it.”
The family consists of a mother and father — Amanda, an advertising account director, and Clay, a professor of English and media studies at City College — and their two children, 13year-old Rose and 15-yearold Archie, who has “misshapen sneakers the size of bread loaves,” one of the book’s many memorable phrases.
Mr. Alam dwells too long on domestic scenes in the opening pages as the family settles in to their Airbnb. Despite this, he shows a keen understanding of the psychology of his characters, especially when writing of Amanda, who, in a startling opening admission, says that now that she and Clay are getting older — she’s 43 — she “had no emotions left around the theoretical death of her husband. She’d love again, she told herself. He was a good man.”
After the kids go to bed one night, someone knocks on the door. At the threshold is the well-to-do Black couple who own the house: group fund manager G.H. Washington and his wife, Ruth. They’ve driven from their Upper East Side apartment because of a major blackout that has paralyzed the eastern U.S. Their apartment no longer felt safe, so they hoped they could share the vacation home with Amanda and Clay untilthe blackout ends.
It soon becomes clear that the blackout is a part of a bigger and more cataclysmic event. In the book’s final quarter, the increasingly gruesome plot takes over, and Mr. Alam abandons much of the nuance and characterization that had distinguished the book.
Before then, “Leave the World Behind” is a quietly devastating commentary on both the need for people to unite during trying times and the mitigating factors, from class distinctions to racism — Amanda is particularly suspicious of the Washingtons when they arrive — that can prevent some people from trusting others.
Early in the book, G.H. boasts that he made his money by knowing how to collect and interpret information. “You learn how to read the curve,” he says. “It tells you the future. It holds steady and promises harmony.” As this ominous book suggests, if you want to head off an apocalypse, you have to do more than read a curve. First, you have to get the right information. And then do what the curve says.