Book Review: Leave the World Behind

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

The first word that comes to mind when I think about the novel Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam is “eerie.” I felt like I was on edge the entire time I was reading this book, waiting on high alert for a monster to pop out of every page.

Leave the World Behind is the story of a family vacation gone very, very wrong. Amanda and Clay rent a home (decked out with a hot tub and pool) on Long Island for a summer getaway with their two teenagers. One night, the elderly couple who owns the home, GH and Ruth, show up on the doorstep. GH and Ruth say they are fleeing Manhattan, where a city-wide blackout has made their fourteenth-floor apartment inaccessible. Suddenly, the phones are down, the TV isn’t working, and the internet won’t load.

Tension oozes out of every part of this novel. First, there’s the dynamic between the two couples, home owners and home renters. Amanda and Clay are white, Ruth and GH are Black. With no internet or phones, Amanda and Clay have no way of confirming the older couple’s story after they arrive at the Long Island house. Amanda’s first thought after their arrival, when she’s trying to assess whether to believe their story: “This didn’t seem to her like the sort of house where black people lived” (38). There’s also the owner/renter dynamic. When the world is ending, who has the right to bunker down in the Long Island house, the Airbnb guests paying to stay there for the week, or the owners with the title to the property?

Then there’s the tension around what in the world is happening in New York. The four main characters know close to nothing, so we, as readers, are in the same boat. But strange things are happening around their little Long Island bubble: a herd of a thousand deer wanders through the woods behind the house, a woman approaches Clay’s car, sobbing and speaking in rapid Spanish. Most eerily, one afternoon, the two families are shaken to their cores when they hear an unidentifiable, Earth-shattering noise. I think I was actually physically sweating when I read this part of the book. I want to share an excerpt because Alam does an incredible job of describing something completely indescribable:

This was a noise, yes, but one so loud that it was almost a physical presence, so sudden because of course there was no precedent…Of course they’d never heard a noise like that before. You didn’t hear such a noise; you experienced it, endured it, survived it, witnessed it. You could fairly say that their lives could be divided in two: the period before they’d heard that noise and the period after (127).

It’s remarkable that Alam was able to make me feel so on edge while I was reading this book because when you look at the story overall, you realize the characters are never subject to very much direct action. The power of Alam’s storytelling comes from the limitations of his narrator’s worldview: as readers, we know what the main characters know, which, really, is not very much. The tension and drama stem from increasing lack of knowledge as the story progresses — is this a routine blackout? A war? A plague? The apocalypse?

We read this book in my book club this month, and one friend pointed out that the lack of action made her wonder, “what’s the point?” I think my answer to that question is that while Leave the World Behind is fictional, it actually portrays a pretty realistic apocalypse scenario. In other dystopian books and movies I’ve read/watched, there’s a lot of drama and action — people fighting tooth and nail for their lives, swimming through rivers of toxic chemicals, hunting rabid squirrels for sustenance, etc.

But if you think about what it would really be like to live through the apocalypse (which is not hard to do, given the past year we’ve had), do you think it would actually be so dramatic on a micro level? More likely than not, many of us would hide in our houses, dig out the spare candles and canned foods, and try to piece things together based on what limited information we could gather.

I don’t want to give too much away because the beauty of this book is the experience of being in the dark and seeing the story play out as the protagonists do. Alam’s writing is so descriptive and potent that you will undoubtedly feel like you’re on vacation too, trapped in a Long Island house alongside these two families as they try to figure out what the hell is happening to their world.

You can buy Leave the World Behind here.

Rating: 4 stars

Rating Scale:
5 Stars: I love this book!!!
4 Stars: Pretty good
3 Stars: Good
2 Stars: Not for me
1 Star: Truly dislike