Rumaan Alam, _Leave the World Behind_

REMINDED ME OF Don DeLillo’s The Silence, which also involves an unspecified catastrophe that knocks out the internet, a circumstance that complicates the catastrophe in that the characters have no idea about the catastrophe's nature or extent because they (like you and I) get all their information from the internet.

The Silence came out first, but DeLillo and Alam must have been writing about the same time. Interesting that they hit on so similar a situation.

From the first  half or so off Alam's novel, though, we have something quite different from DeLillo's story, more of a satire on American race relations. We have a white New York couple, one an academic and the other in some kind of high-stress business, and their two teenaged kids on the way to a vacation rental well out of the city. They get comfortable in the very comfortable  house, then the owners show up, their plans having been obstructed by whatever weirdness the onset of the catastrophe has set in motion. The owners are Black.

This struck me as a brilliant situation. There's the comic potential of who gets to make decisions about what, given that the owners of the house are, after all, its owners, but the renters, after all, have rented it for the week. There's the abrasion of class difference, since the owners are in a much higher tax bracket than  the renters. Then there's the racial difference--Katie, bar the door!

Alam displays keen satirical insight in getting all these plates spinning, and he keeps them spinning by keeping the point of view moving rapidly; whereas a lot of of novelists might have given us a chapter from this character's perspective, then a chapter from that of another, and so on, Alam often changes point-of-view a few times even on a single page. The rapid, caroming collisions of the renters' assumptions about the owners with the owners' assumptions about the renters makes for some great moments and some rising tension.

Around mid-point, though, the novel's catastrophe plot overtakes its social satire, and the tension (I felt) actually dissipates as the characters find themselves similarly non-plussed in their incomprehension of the catastrophe. Is the point that crises unite us? Maybe. We never really find out what the crisis is (though there are many ominous prolepses, such as that the neighbors will never return), so we hardly know whether we are justified in drawing a lesson from it or not. 

Alam is smart, has a sharp eye for contemporary detail, and possesses a true satirist's scalpel. It did seem, though, that the novel changed its trajectory about halfway through, in a way I found disappointing.