rumaan alam leave the world behind review

The husband is supposed to be reviewing a book for the Times, but finds this process tedious, is insecure about his talents as an intellect and a patriarch, and is a professor of “English, but also media studies” with tenure. Clay and Amanda, professional white residents of a fancy Brooklyn neighborhood (Carroll Gardens), and their two children, 13-year-old Rose and 16-year-old Archie, drive to a Long Island vacation in the lovely home of total strangers for $340 a night, arranged through Airbnb.

When I first read the novel, a month earlier, it had already been optioned for a movie starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. Since its release in October, Leave The World Behind has attracted near universal praise from reviewers, appeared for several weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. The novel courts indifference and is ultimately bested by it, cast out like its characters on the shimmering surface of experience to face oblivion. Without entertaining alternatives, they continue to shut out the world and cling to the security of their exclusive, expensive clan. As the families weather mysterious indications of a far-reaching and deadly disaster and their placid retreat mutates into a shelter from apocalypse, they carry on with their drinking and small-talk, never knowing what to feel or what to do. Alam is drawn to characters resigned to lives of quiet consumerism, shaping the novel around a couple of well-to-do, internet-addled families at a vacation home. Not in its style, which lacks the attention-grabbing initiative of an algorithm, but because the potential to make meaning of its successive sentences seems totally beside the point. This is what reading Rumaan Alam’s third novel Leave The World Behind is like. A voice is narrating unreliably, as if from the sky, or whatever it is that’s all you can see anymore. Nestled among your preferred ideology, drama, and household products, reality looks calamitous but feels safe. At times, scrolling through one’s feed feels like reading a rollicking, absorbing social novel, but in fragments, disordered, and with the reverse effect, since when you lose yourself in it, your interest goes too, and everything is vaguely similar: what you buy, what you owe, what tragedy befell someone else. S ocial media didn’t invent apathy, but it has a particular genius for reproducing it.

Rumaan alam leave the world behind review