“Leave the World Behind” begins like a delicate portrait of a typical family going on vacation to a rented home in a remote part of Long Island, but it soon turns into a much darker story filled with dread. At first it feels like an Anne Tyler novel and then slides into Cormac McCarthy. I think it's clever how Alam draws you into the lives of parents Amanda and Clay to fully understand the minutiae of their psychology and self-centredness. They are probably no more egotistical than most people, but definitely justify their attitudes and actions based on notions of inherent privilege. Therefore, they find it deeply challenging and frightening when, after settling into their accommodation, an older black couple named the Washingtons arrive on their doorstep late one night. Ruth and G.H. Washington assert that they are the owners and need to stay in their home because there's been a peculiar blackout in NYC. While they have no means of getting information through the news or internet, we follow the story of how this group is terrifyingly cut off from larger world events as the world descends into chaos. It's a kind of dystopian story as felt through the limited perspective of a group of characters but also says something larger about the flimsy magnanimity of white middle-upper class life.
Recently I read Don DeLillo's most recent novel “The Silence” which has a very similar premise. A group of people find themselves isolated and ignorant about the larger cataclysmic events of the world when they are cut off from the media. It's a potent and timely situation as we increasingly find ourselves utterly dependant on understanding events and the shape of society as filtered through the internet. Yet, where DeLillo's book felt more like a studious exercise, Alam's story was much more successful as a satisfying novel that raises a number of compelling ideas while delivering a chilling, compulsively-readable tale. It's cleverly structured in how we're trapped in the limited perspective of the characters through much of the story, but later on we glimpse the devolving structures of the world. The reader fully understands how everything is going badly wrong but also feels the agonizing fear of the characters as they experience little signs which indicate that they're all in deep trouble. Deer flock past the house in unusually high numbers. Flamingoes unnaturally inhabit their area. Amanda and Clay's son becomes strangely ill. Their control and grasp of the world slowly seeps away and this results in a horrifying kind of derangement. It made this novel an effective, potent and unsettling read.
