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Résumé
Résumé
A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!
Finalist for the 2020 National Book Award (Fiction)
A Best Book of the Year From: The Washington Post * Time * NPR * Elle * Esquire * Kirkus * Library Journal * The Chicago Public Library * The New York Public Library * BookPage * The Globe and Mail * EW.com * The LA Times * USA Today * InStyle * The New Yorker * AARP * Publisher's Lunch * LitHub * Book Marks * Electric Literature * Brooklyn Based * The Boston Globe
A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.
From the bestselling author of Rich and Pretty comes a suspenseful and provocative novel keenly attuned to the complexities of parenthood, race, and class. Leave the World Behind explores how our closest bonds are reshaped--and unexpected new ones are forged--in moments of crisis.
Amanda 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. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple--it's their house, and they've arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. 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.
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 other?
Critiques (5)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
In Alam's spectacular and ominous latest (after That Kind of Mother), a family's idyllic summer retreat coincides with global catastrophe. Amanda and Clay, married white Brooklynites with two children, rent a secluded house in the Hamptons for a summer vacation. Their "illusion of ownership" is shattered when the house's proprietors, G.H. and Ruth, an African American couple in their 60s, show up unannounced from New York City. Widespread blackouts have hit the East Coast, and G.H. and Ruth are seeking refuge in the beach house they've rented out. The returned owners are greeted with polite suspicion and simmering resentment: "It was torture, a home invasion without rape or guns," thinks Amanda. G.H. and Ruth, in turn, can't help but wish their renters gone ("G. H.'s familiar old fridge yielded nothing but surprise. He'd not have filled it with such things"). But over a couple days, they form an uneasy collective as a series of strange and increasingly menacing events herald cataclysmic change, from migrating herds of deer to the thunder of military jets roaring overhead. The omniscient narrator occasionally zooms out to provide snapshots of the wider chaotic world that are effective in their brevity. Though information is scarce, the signs of impending collapse--ecological and geopolitical--have been glaringly visible to the characters all along: "No one could plead ignorance that was not willful." This illuminating social novel offers piercing commentary on race, class and the luxurious mirage of safety, adding up to an all-too-plausible apocalyptic vision. (Oct.)
Critique du Guardian
An unexpected knock at the door. It's the narrative spark of children's jokes, fairytales and campfire ghost stories, of drawing-room dramas and horror film bloodbaths. When a midnight knock breaks the quiet of Rumaan Alam's Leave the World Behind, any one of these plot creatures might be waiting on the doorstep. Alam's trope-heavy third novel has the makings of a farce, and the portents of a slaughter. It is a dark and stormy night. In a field surrounded by woods stands a lone brick house - "the very material the smartest piggy chose because it would keep him safest" - a luxurious Long Island vacation rental that is out of reach of mobile phone service, and out of earshot of the neighbours. The walls are white, the picket fence is white, and inside the house is a white middle-class family of holidaymakers "pantomiming ownership". The children - Archie and Rose - are sun-kissed and sleeping; their Brooklynite parents - Amanda and Clay - are basking in a post-coital glow. "They'd made a nice life for themselves, hadn't they?" Begging entry are George (GH) and Ruth Washington, a black couple in their 60s who claim to own the place. GH stands at the door with his hands aloft, "a gesture that was either conciliatory or said Don't shoot". There's been a city-wide blackout, they explain - a sudden and unexplained chaos - so they've driven out from Manhattan to their rural bolthole to seek refuge. The vacationers are sceptical. "This didn't seem to her like the sort of house where black people lived," Amanda thinks to herself. "But what did she mean by that?" It's a delicious conceit, a theatrically contained collision of power and prejudice. There's such scope for viciousness, and for virtue, too, even if it is only signalled ("morality was vanity, in the end"). And while there's no ignoring the high-concept contrivance of the novel's doorstep confrontation, there's a sharp pleasure in watching Alam pull the expository strings. As in Alam's previous fiction, the languid opening act of Leave the World Behind is a high-res cultural X-ray - liberal America's white bones a-glowing. There's indolent Clay, a tenured professor who "wanted to be asked to write for the New York Times Book Review but didn't want to actually write anything"; and striving Amanda, sunbathing on her ethically sourced beach blanket ("She had to pretend her way to being a good person"). Only Alam could turn the contents of the family's supermarket trolley into a cultural diagnosis. Yet once he has manoeuvred his cast into position, Alam seems unsure what to do with - or to - them. The two families wake the morning after the New York blackout and vacillate. Should someone venture out and investigate? Should Amanda and Clay pack up their things and leave? Should someone fetch snacks? When a soul-rending, glass-cracking noise fills the sky, any pretence that life is normal is obliterated. "You didn't hear such a noise: you experienced it, endured it, survived it, witnessed it." But the noise only entrenches the group's indecision. George keeps the booze flowing; Rose bakes a packet cake; Amanda marvels at the beauty of the Vermont stone countertops. All of them are trapped in a kind of decadent, feckless daze, like smoke-drunk bees - a learned helplessness after decades of institutional rot. "It was like some tacit agreement," Alam writes, "everyone had ceded to things just falling apart." And perhaps this is the resounding point of the book: when faced with the prospect of world-altering calamity - its moral exigencies and necessary sacrifices - we're unlikely to do much at all except break out the hummus. It's less an accusation than a grotesquely banal human truth. Leave the World Behind is the kind of novel that begs comparisons: Jordan Peele films, Black Mirror episodes, and Bong Joon-ho's Parasite; John Guare's play Six Degrees of Separation and the short fiction of John Cheever and Ray Bradbury. And - of course - any number of titles from contemporary literature's ever-growing catalogue of dystopias (Helen Phillips's The Need comes to mind). The novel itself even suggests a contender, a class-flipped take on that Sidney Poitier classic, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? With such pop-cultural literacy, it's no wonder Leave the World Behind has already been optioned by Netflix. But Alam's novel invites this comparative shorthand because it struggles to develop a personality of its own. George and Ruth, for instance, are never granted the interiority that animates (and indicts) Amanda and Clay; they become genial placeholders. And while we catch omniscient snatches of the coming death and ruin, Alam's catastrophe is conveniently vague - a catalyst for more intimate terrors. It's one of those geopolitical eruptions so beloved of dystopian fiction, a world-ending confrontation that somehow takes the world by surprise. As the book's caustic ambitions falter, what remains is something more raw-hearted and earnest, a novel about the agonies of parenting. How can you love one another, once you realise you cannot save one another? Alam asks. How can you look your child in the eye when you realise their world will be worse than yours? That's no dystopic hypothetical: it's the sound of the future pounding at the door.
Critique de Kirkus
An interrupted family vacation, unexpected visitors, a mysterious blackout--something is happening, and the world may never be the same. On a reassuringly sunny summer day, Amanda, an account director in advertising; Clay, a college professor; and their children, Archie, 15, and Rose, 13, make their way from Brooklyn to a luxury home (swimming pool! hot tub! marble countertops!) in a remote area of Long Island they've rented for a family vacation. Shortly after they arrive, however, the family's holiday is interrupted by a knock on the door: The house's owners, a prosperous older black couple--George Washington and his wife, Ruth--have shown up unannounced because New York City has been plunged into a blackout and their Park Avenue high-rise apartment didn't feel safe. Soon it becomes clear that the blackout is a symptom (or is it a cause?) of something larger--and nothing is safe. Has there been a nuclear or climate disaster, a war, a terrorist act, a bomb? Alam's story unfolds like a dystopian fever dream cloaked in the trappings of a dream vacation: Why do hundreds of deer show up in the house's well-maintained backyard or a flock of bright-pink flamingos frolic in the family pool and then fly away? What is the noise, loud enough to crack glass, that comes, without warning, once and then, later, repeatedly? Is it safer to go back to the city, to civilization, or to remain away, in a world apart? As they search for answers and adjust to what increasingly appears to be a confusing new normal, the two families--one black, one white; one older, one younger; one rich, one middle-class--are compelled to find community amid calamity, to come together to support each other and survive. As he did in his previous novels, Rich and Pretty (2016) and That Kind of Mother (2018), Alam shows an impressive facility for getting into his characters' heads and an enviable empathy for their moral shortcomings, emotional limitations, and failures of imagination. The result is a riveting novel that thrums with suspense yet ultimately offers no easy answers--disappointing those who crave them even as it fittingly reflects our time. Addressing race, risk, retreat, and the ripple effects of a national emergency, Alam's novel is just in time for this moment. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique de Booklist
Amanda and Craig and their children, Archie and Rose, hope to leave their troubles behind as they vacation in a remote Long Island cottage. But the world has a way of finding you. Barely a day into their vacation, the house's owners come knocking. Panicked by a total blackout in Manhattan, where they usually reside, Ruth and G. H. are seeking refuge in their other home. As if to confirm the couple's unease, unsettling events--flamingos flying in the woods, an earth-shattering noise invading the saturated summer silence--transpire. As they do, Alam (That Kind of Mother, 2018) brilliantly captures the shift in dynamics between the two families, from apprehension about each other to a collective front against an external entity. The narrative's increasing tempo expertly dives into subtle yet incisive intersections between class and race, since the vacationers are white, and G. H. and Ruth are Black. Alam's novel lobs a series of unsettling questions: How will we react to the next nebulous horror? How will we parent? What will we define as home? "Home was just where you were, in the end. It was just the place where you found yourself," thinks Rose. In a world constantly on edge, this will have to pass for consolation.
Critique du Library Journal
This latest from Alam (That Kind of Mother) is so clever and so subtle that it draws readers into a false sense of security and understanding, much like that experienced by Amanda and Clay, who have brought their children to a lovely rental home on Long Island. Initially, the book seems to be about a modern marriage and family, priorities and choices, and how one measures success in the 21st century, and it is. But it is also much more. Their vacation bubble is abruptly burst when Ruth and G.H., the homeowners, unexpectedly come knocking late one night, bringing news of a major blackout in New York City. Electricity is on at the rental home, and all seems well, but there is no phone signal or internet access. Amanda and Clay don't know what to believe, and Alam's writing palpably captures their uneasiness, vulnerability, and fear for their children, with the narrative at turns riveting and disconcerting but in the best way. Readers are given clues to events in the outside world even as the characters remain unaware, but much is left unexplained, leaving the disquiet to linger long after the finish. VERDICT Highly recommended and perfectly timed for today's uncertain world. [See Prepub Alert, 4/1/2020.]--Shaunna E. Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA
