These characters are built with the kind of intimate detail that allows you to see them in people you know (or in yourself: the Los Angeles Review of Books anxiously asks, “What kind of prejudices do you, liberal you, hold quietly in your heart?”). It shies away from the climate-fiction and apocalypse-novel tropes of survivalism, policy prediction, and community-restructuring taking place over just a few short days, it zooms in on the minutia of just one location, just a few characters, and a feeling of relative isolation. Is Leave the World Behind a disaster novel? Not quite. Yes, Leave the World Behind may be talked to death – but in the first month of 2021, when crisis feels like a chronic condition of life, it feels kind of nice to read a lonely novel in such rich company. But none of these reviews prepared me for the ecological reading the novel invites its overwhelming and effortless sense of scale its staging of characters against the murky background of crisis. With such a saturated storm of chatter surrounding it, Leave the World Behind arrived on my bookshelf primed to walk the line between over-wrought critical darling and disaster-novel-secretly-hiding-something-more-serious.
Every major review venue has something to say about this narrow little apocalypse story, from meditations on its shifting point-of-view to comparisons to Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped-and unexpected new ones are forged-in moments of crisis.The popular conversation about Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel Leave the World Behind risks exhaustion. Suspenseful and provocative, Rumaan Alam's third novel is keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. 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?
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. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. are an older black couple-it's their house, and they've arrived in a panic. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.Īmanda 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.
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