When the end of the world arrives in Leave the World Behind, Rumaan Alam’s third novel, it comes not with a bang or a whimper, but a mysterious sound. Clay, a professor and critic who “wanted to be asked to write for the New York Times Book Review but didn’t want to actually write anything”, is on holiday on Long Island with his wife Amanda, an executive who “wanted her colleagues to need her as God wants people to keep praying”, and their children Archie and Rose. Late one night, there is a knock at the door of their Airbnb: GH and Ruth, the elderly black owners of the house, have just witnessed a mysterious power outage in New York and could they please come inside? Then comes the sound: “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 into two: the period before they’d heard that noise and the period after.”
Like much in the novel, the noise is never explained. But this is what makes Leave the World Behind so frightening: “Our need to know stems from us as a species always looking for authority, for answers, for leaders – for parents, fundamentally,” Alam says. “We just want to be told what to do and when we aren’t, it is scary. We’ve always needed to know.”
As the author of a book about people trapped inside a house by a huge event, desperate for information, Alam is a curious prophet. Leave the World Behind has already been optioned by Netflix with Julia Roberts set to play Amanda who, anxious and babbling in her uselessness, blurts out: “You know, you look a little like Denzel Washington,” to GH, who will be played by Denzel Washington.
“I couldn’t see that the chosen metaphor – isolation inside the domestic space – would become our reality. But what we are experiencing now is part of a bigger moment, there has been a feeling of discomfort for a while,” Alam says. “The notion that our institutions are less stable than we thought, in the UK, in the US, around the world – this moment is longer than we want to believe. Things are so crazy now that it is hard for us to isolate the shooting of the archduke, the thing that will become the narrative of history.”
Alam has an almost anthropological eye for the absurdities of the upper-middle class, for the blindness of white people. “This didn’t seem to her like the sort of house where black people lived,” Amanda thinks when GH knocks on the door, then wonders what she means. Reassured by the feel of his Vermont stone countertops, GH is certain of their survival due to his wine collection and stash of energy bars. Amanda orders Clay to fill a bath with water, having a vague memory of this being helpful in emergencies. The adults retreat to the hot tub to drink vodka and start composing the anecdotes they will tell when this is all over – not knowing that it is just the beginning.
Alam – who “knows to fill the bath but our drain doesn’t work, so we’d be screwed” – lives in Brooklyn with his husband David Land, a photographer, and their two adopted sons, Simon and Xavier. Four years ago, many reviewers seemed surprised that Rich and Pretty, Alam’s incisive portrait of female friendship in upper-middle class America, could be written by a gay Bangladeshi-American man. His 2018 follow-up, That Kind of Mother, about a white woman who adopts her black nanny’s child, similarly confused them. (“Are you actually a woman?” one interviewer asked him.)
Alam’s mother and father, a paediatrician and architect respectively, moved from Bangladesh to Washington DC in the 1970s. Alam grew up ensconced in the heart of upper-middle class white society in Reagan’s America. Almost all the kids in his school were white.
“My parents valued the American dream. They valued raising us as Americans. And I don’t mean to suggest any failing on their part, it was just like that when I was growing up,” he says. “We would go to Bangladesh maybe once every three or four years, and I had to confront the fact that it was meaningful for my parents to be there while I was missing peanut butter and jelly. I wouldn’t want to eat the food. I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying to me. I didn’t belong there. It’s a strange thing to not really belong in this place that your parents still belong to, while always being reminded that you don’t belong at home.”
He went to Oberlin College to study English, where he read “the genteel middle-class novels of the 80s, books by Lorrie Moore and Ann Beattie. That’s how I understood fiction to work. And so that’s what I do.”
“I think, at least in this country, we have a very literal way of reading,” he says. “If you simply throw your voice outside of your own body, it disorients the reader. You know, ‘Oh, this man couldn’t possibly feel as this fictionalised woman is describing.’ I don’t know when we got so essentialist. I’m frustrated at the idea that somebody who looks the way I do would be expected to write a certain kind of book.” Writing about white women – arguably the dominant perspective in publishing – is a kind of rebellion for Alam, “a silly, very minor rebellion on my part, but it is”.
He describes the #OwnVoices movement, which argues that writers should not write about cultural backgrounds outside of their own, as “very well intentioned”, but aside from the implications for his own career, it is not the answer. “There is no question that publishing is extraordinarily white to its detriment, that it is intellectually incurious about establishing a literature that really reflects America. But art thrives when there are no parameters. And inequity must be addressed with capital. Publishing assistants need to be paid more. New people will then enter the business and show new readers that books are urgent and exciting, not rarefied and distant.
“Individual writers can’t fix that. We will have parity when a young black writer gets a big advance and writes a totally fine book that doesn’t really perform well, and still gets more money to write a second and third. Because it takes time! Yeah, it did for Zadie Smith, but you shouldn’t have to be Zadie Smith.”
Leave the World Behind was influenced by Jordan Peele’s film Get Out, apparent in Alam’s acuity on whiteness. But the closest literary comparison could be Shirley Jackson, whose cold, detached voice can be heard in Alam’s narrator when we are shown glimpses of what is happening in the wider world. All the babies in one neonatal unit die when the power goes out. Passengers suffocate on a subway train stalled under the Hudson River. “People locked doors and windows and played board games with their families, though a mother in St Charles, Maryland, drowned her two daughters in the bathtub, which struck her as far more sensible than a round of Chutes and Ladders,” Alam writes. “That game required neither skill nor strategy; all it had to teach was that life was mostly unearned advantage or devastating fall. It took unimaginable courage to kill your children. Few people could manage it.”
It is this authorial voice that makes him call his own novel “old-fashioned”. “It is very different to what is in style right now, you know these novels where the third-person is almost the first, like Rachel Cusk or Ben Lerner.” It is what children experience during a bedtime story, “the pure pleasure of being told: this is the world. It is such a relief to have the book tell you that a plane crashed in Minnesota or that there was a hurricane somewhere else, because you get the rush of knowing when the characters don’t.”
In the summer of 2017, Alam and his family went on holiday, staying in a house that inspired Leave the World Behind. That winter, while writing in an apartment borrowed from his friends, the author Laura Lippman and The Wire creator David Simon, he found himself daydreaming of the house, of idle days in the pool. He wrote half a draft for Leave the World Behind in a week, and finished it in three.
Alam does much of his writing away from home, “because if I am writing at home, I am also folding laundry, making spaghetti, playing with Lego”. He always wanted to be a parent and has written touchingly about fatherhood, as well as being stopped in the street by women who want to praise him for spending time with his children. “Presumably these women imagined a wife I don’t have, at home enjoying some ‘me time’,” he once wrote.
“I actually have no idea if Ian McEwan or Salman Rushdie have children,” he says. “Now maybe that is private for them, but I think being a father has been enriching for my work, I’ve found it really clarifying. There’s a contradiction there, though, because in order to work I have to completely neglect my parental responsibilities. I am aware that most of my female colleagues would feel that going to a hotel to write would make them seem monstrous.”
As the father of two black boys, Alam has confronted “the complicated moral imperative” of talking to his children about racism. “Telling the kids about the news feels like an act of child abuse; not telling the kids about the news does too,” he wrote, not long after the death of George Floyd in May.
“Childhood ends very early for our black and brown children in this country,” he says. “Partly because it has to, because you must prepare them for how to navigate a world that will not see them as adorable little children any more. I would be doing them a disservice if I didn’t talk to them.” And if he has any optimism, it stems from what he sees in his children: “Young people understand the complexity behind Black Lives Matter, whereas older people see a conversation about race as being about grievance and opportunity. There is a certain kind of older person who will say that if you’re good, nothing bad will happen to you. That’s patently untrue, obviously.” Sixteen-year-olds should be allowed to vote, and the rule that says the US president must be older than 35 should be changed to under 35, he thinks: “All of the entrenched political power in the planet today, will all be dead in, God willing, five years. That hugely significant decisions are in the hands of people who have no particular stake in them is totally absurd.”
If anything unites Alam’s three novels, it is his interest in the ways we fail to comprehend one another, the ways in which forces such as class and race separate us. “People weren’t that connected to one another,” he writes, in Leave the World Behind. “Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to the movies or paying your taxes or fucking your wife or worrying about the mortgage.”
This is his most ambitious novel, he thinks. “Anita Brookner is one of my favourite writers, but some readers would say all of her novels are essentially indistinguishable from one another. Then there are writers like Jennifer Egan, where every novel is an experiment. I aspire to be like Egan, and then find myself writing like Brookner. The fear is, are you just a one-trick pony? I don’t know. Does every writer feel that?” he worries. Then he smiles with a tinge of menace. “If anything, I have learned to frustrate the reader. I hope people realise that you can’t make sense of it. You wouldn’t. And that is what is chilling.”