Review of LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND by Rumaan Alam

 3.5 Stars

There is much about this book that will feel familiar to people living through a pandemic and feeling trapped in a state of continual unease. 

Amanda and Clay, a couple from Brooklyn, take their teenaged children, Archie and Rose, to eastern Long Island where they’ve rented a luxurious house for a week’s vacation.  All is well until the homeowners, GH and Ruth Washington, arrive with news of a blackout in New York and they ask to take refuge.  Though they have electricity, all communication with the outside world is cut off:  there is no radio or television and no internet or phone service.  Strange and increasingly menacing things happen so they know something devastating has occurred.  Then Archie’s health becomes a concern.  What happened?  How will they cope?

The story is narrated from the third person omniscient point of view; the reader is given access to the thoughts and feelings of the characters as the narrator flits from one person to another.  Occasionally, that narrator makes comments about the state of the world or what will happen:  “She did not know that the Chinese man who ran [the neighborhood Laundromat], was inside the elevator that carried passengers between the turnstiles and the platform at the R train station in Brooklyn Heights, and he’d been there for hours, and he’d die there, though that was many hours in the future yet” and planes “were off to intercept something that approached the nation’s eastern flank” and “in an old-age home in a coastal town called Port Victory a Vietnam vet named Peter Miller was floating facedown in two feet of water.  That Delta had lost a plane travelling between Dallas and Minneapolis during the disruption of the air traffic control system.  That a pipeline was spilling crude onto the ground in an unpopulated part of Wyoming.  That a major television star had been struck by a car at the intersection of Seventy-Ninth and Amsterdam and died because the ambulances couldn’t get anywhere” and “The next generation of these deer would be born white as the unicorn in those Flemish tapestries” because of “intergenerational trauma.”

We are given only bits of information, not told exactly what happened.  Was there a natural disaster or a manmade catastrophe?  Was there an accident or did someone carry out an act with malicious intent?  Did “the morbidly obese grandson of the Eternal President” send a bomb?  The lack of details adds to the sense of menace.  The author suggests however, that what happened does not matter:  “Did it matter if a storm had metastasized into something for which no noun yet existed?  Did it matter if the electrical grid broke apart like something built of Lego? . . . Did it matter if some nation claimed responsibility for the outage, did it matter that it was condemned as an act of war, did it matter if this was pretext for a retaliation long hoped for, did it matter that proving who had done what via wires and networks was actually impossible?”

What the author suggests is important is how people react.  It becomes obvious that the adults are not prepared.  They seem capable, successful people but their experiences are largely irrelevant in the face of what is happening.  They become fearful and spend their time trying to cling to normalcy by eating, drinking, relaxing in the hot tub, and doing laundry.  Their conversations are endless loops of indecision and useless conjecture.  They really don’t know what to do.

The book suggests that we live irrationally.  We tend to focus on financial security.  Surely we should know that “life was about change” and “the illness of the planet had never been a secret, the nature of it all had never been in doubt.”  After all, “information had always been there waiting for them, in the gradual death of Lebanon’s cedars, in the disappearance of the river dolphin, in the renaissance of cold-war hatred, in the discovery of fission, in the capsizing vessels crowded with Africans.  No one could plead ignorance that was not willful.”  As the pandemic has shown, we are unprepared for catastrophe despite its increasing likelihood:  “Comfort and safety were just an illusion.  Money meant nothing.  All that meant anything was this – people, in the same place, together.  This was what was left to them.”  We can’t leave the world behind; we may not have the luxury of clairvoyance, but we should know that reality will always catch up. 

The book does not show humans on their best behaviour, suggesting instead that humans often reject others in their time of need.  Racism exists, as evidenced in Amanda and Clay’s reactions to learning that the homeowners are black:  “those people didn’t look like the sort to own such a beautiful house.  They might, though, clean it.”  In fact, none of the characters is particularly likeable.

Because of its portrayal of what it’s like to live through an evolving crisis, this novel is not an easy read.  It is, however, thought-provoking.