The Monthly Read – That Vacation Feeling

A Review of  Leave the World Behind Rumaan Alam

• MARY DRAKE –

Going on vacation is a chance to get away from it all. We’re lulled into a different mindset in which we Leave the World Behind, which is the title of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 book about a couple and their two teenagers who do just that; they leave New York City for a vacation in the country. They find the perfect house to rent for a week. Finally, Amanda and Clay have the leisure to re-ignite their sex lives, the kids enjoy the in-ground pool, and everyone revels in delicious food. All is drowsy contentment, until . . . .

A knock on the front door cracks open their fragile daydream. Granted, the knock comes late at night, when they’re all tired from having fun and when darkness makes everything seem a little more dangerous. But it’s just Ruth and G.H., an older black couple fleeing an unexplained blackout in NYC for the safety of this house, which they claim to own.

What follows is a study in human suspicion, class distinctions, and race relations. Could this couple be dangerous con artists? How likely is it that black people could own a house like this? Amanda and Clay wonder if they can continue their vacation with strangers in the house, or should they go home? But despite their initial uncertainty, they are all unintentionally drawn together by the noise. It happens while Amanda and G.H. are chatting in the hot tub, talking about work, money, approaches toward life, when something unexpected happens that changes their lives forever. They hear 

a noise…so loud that it was almost a physical presence…they’d never heard a noise like that before. You didn’t hear such a noise; you experienced it…You could fairly say that their lives could be divided into two: the period before they’d heard that noise and the period after. 

It’s a noise that signals something we all fear—the beginning of the end. If the recent spate of apocalyptic, disaster novels is any indication, we humans are obsessed with our own demise. Alam’s book has been compared to other dystopian novels, like The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy, where the Earth is nothing but a scorched hull, burned to ash; Station Eleven (2014) by Emily St. John Mandel, in which almost everyone has died from the “Georgian flu”; Severance (2018) by Ling Ma, featuring a zombie apocalypse brought about by the “Shen flu”; and Silence (2020) by Don DeLillo, when all digital communications blink out and the characters are left to ponder what life has meant to them. If this year of the pandemic has done anything, it’s made us consider our demise. Fiction provides a way of working out our fears of death and disruption; it’s an outlet for our uncertainty and a way to imagine how we’d cope.  

Alam’s novel, however, is different from other disaster novels in that the characters witness—if only in an auditory way—the disaster occurring. But they’re unsure what they’ve “witnessed.” The suspense of finding out what caused the power outage along the eastern seaboard and what was the source of the life-altering noise keeps us reading. We’re riveted to see what the characters will do when they begin noticing deer migrating by the thousands, when tropical flamingoes improbably land in their New York swimming pool, when they stop hearing cars or planes or sirens. 

At first, they do nothing, continuing their daily chores of fixing meals and making beds, as if the world hasn’t changed, until one of the teens begins to suffer alarming physical symptoms. Will they help each other or bail out? It’s some comfort that Alam has their better instincts prevail:

Amanda went and stood in the kitchen, unsure what to do next. Ruth followed because she was moved to reassure her. That damnable instinct. She had to help. They were colleagues not as mothers but as humans. This—all this—was a problem to be shared.

At least within the same house, the problem is shared. When they leave to find help, G.H. insists that his “friend” Danny, a contractor who worked on their house, “of all people, would understand what was happening, and have, if not a solution, a strategy.” Instead, Danny doesn’t know any more than they do, and he tells them “What you do is your business. . . . I’m locking my doors. I’m getting out my gun.” 

We want to believe that we’re all connected, and Alam fosters that belief by having a third-person narrator who slips in and out of the characters’ minds as the action is occurring. But in addition to what the characters are thinking, there’s an occasional, omniscient voice that lets us know how bad things really are, that commuters are suffocating in a subway stalled underground, that someone famous died from an automobile accident because no ambulance could navigate the clogged metropolitan roads, and that others, too, are beginning to suffer mysterious symptoms.

 Ironically, it’s the youngest member of this haphazard group who knows what to do: “Rose had read books, Rose had seen movies, Rose knew how this story would end, and Rose knew they shouldn’t panic, but prepare,” and to that end she goes off seeking food and supplies they will need.

Rumaan Alam is such a master of detail that he can make a simple run to the grocery story reveal more about a character than pages of explanation. Early in the book, Amanda goes shopping and we’re told that she buys things like blueberries, specialty mustard, organic hot dogs, premium vodka, real maple syrup, Ben and Jerry’s “politically virtuous” ice cream, and coffee filters made of recycled paper. Wow. What better way to reveal that she’s health conscious, environmentally aware, and affluent enough to put her money where her beliefs are. She’s also a concerned mother, since she buys several brands to please her family’s varied preferences, but not such a good mother that she doesn’t have sexual fantasies about the bag boy. “Vacations did that, didn’t they,” she thinks, “made you horny, made everything seem possible, a life completely different than the one you normally inhabited.” She has no idea—how could she?—how radically different everyone’s life is about to become.

This is Alam’s third novel, the first two being That Kind of Mother and Rich and Pretty. Leave the World Behind was nominated for the 2020 National Book Award and Netflix is working on an adaptation starring Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts. It’s something to look forward to and Leave the World Behind is well worth the read.