Title: Leave the World Behind Author: Rumaan Alam
Published: October 6, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 241
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older black couple—it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area—with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service—it’s hard to know what to believe.
Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple—and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?
It’s deliciously unsettling that Rumaan Alam was able to deliver a 2020 novel that so perfectly encapsulates 2020 as a concept. (Presumably, he wrote this at least a year in advance of its release date.)
As we can all attest, global catastrophe seen from the ground level is not particularly riveting. You stay in your home because it isn’t safe to go out. Meanwhile, the trickle of “facts” you’re able to glean from the outside is useless at best, and deeply misleading at worse. You drink vodka and have sex with your husband. Meanwhile, people are dying, governments are deploying military force against unarmed citizens, and President Trump is cowering uselessly inside the White House. You bake a cake; you wish you could hold your grandkids; you masturbate because at least it’s something to do.
Did I just describe Leave the World Behind, or did I describe reality?
Difficult to say, and that’s why this even-keeled, literary horror is so successful. The truly frightening thing here is that the characters don’t know what is actually happening, what dangers exist, what they need to run from. Is it your polite white neighbors who drive Range Rovers, secretly hate Obama, and stockpile weapons? Is it extreme weather events? Is it nuclear weapons? Is it an unexplained viral pandemic? IS IT ALL AT OF THEM AT ONCE?!
Once it gets going, Leave the World Behind is an exquisitely unsettling novel, precisely because Alam trades in the kind of mundane, vague sense of unease that has become the norm for everyone this year.
Unfortunately, before it gets going, Alam spends about 15 chapters indulging in absolutely pretentious, navel-gazey prose, describing a prepubescent child’s genitals and her father’s erection in vulgar-yet-highbrow imagery. He meticulously details items bought on a trip to the grocery store and uses painfully try-hard vocabulary such as “odalisques.” Eventually, the self-centered rich white New Yorker narrative ventures into the eerie apocalyptic story I described at the beginning of the review. And I understand that groundwork had to be laid initially. But…less describing a 13-year-old’s “pundendum” next time, thanks.
As I said, though—this is the book for 2020. The everyday horror of government and society crumbling while we all continue to smile and go to work has never felt more vitally terrifying—or more important.
Ahahahahaha, you know, I read Alam’s first book and wasn’t wild about it, but the premise of this one sounded a lot more relevant to my interests and I’ve been trying to decide if I wanted to read it. When I saw you had reviewed it I was like “great; Renae will definitely be able to tell me whether I’d like it or not” and having read this review, I have discerned that I would not like it. My patience for swooshy prose is at an absolute minimum even when that prose ISN’T describing genitals exhaustively. 😛
I don’t think I could EVER recommend this book to a single person. One of those things where I liked it but was also just ???. Cis men really have some strange ideas about how women think of their boobs. Very “Guy in My MFA” type prose. :/