Leave the World Behind

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Zarathustra
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Leave the World Behind

Post by Zarathustra »

A novel by Rumaan Alam, whom I've never read before, but I was talked into this by my girlfriend.

The premise: a white family on vacation at a remote AirBnB home on Long Island have to confront the dual horrors of 1) the world ending and 2) the black owners of the rental home deciding to barge in on their vacation.

I'm being a little sarcastic. We don't actually know if the world is ending, and it's really not horrible or even controversial that the owners are black. I've read some reviews (NPR, NYT, etc) where the reviewers seem to think it's a big damn deal that white people are forced to be in the same room with black people, and if we think that's weird, then "this novel has lured you into confronting your own racist biases." Jesus. The novel didn't lure me into confronting anything except just how boring a novel can be before I put it down for good.

This one just barely made it. I read all the way to the anticlimactic non-ending. The "story" just stops. Really, it could have stopped anywhere in the previous 100 pages and made as much sense as stopping where it did. That's because this isn't a story at all. It's a scene. A 232 page scene. The dialog consists of endlessly repeating, "What are we going do? What is going on? What was that noise? Should we fill the tub with water? I don't know." Over and over and over and fucking over.

There is absolutely nothing creepy, or suspenseful, or controversial, or thought-provoking in the entire "story." People spend the whole book making sandwiches, cakes, drinks, pasta . . . oh god please make the food descriptions STOP! There are three consecutive pages dedicated to the shopping cart list of groceries the mom picks up at the store. Three pages of nothing but groceries! We get it! They are normal people who eat normal food!

I'm going to be generous and try to find some worth in what I just read. I suppose you could say that it displays how dependent we all are on our technology, and without phones or Internet we're pretty clueless (except I grew up in the woods without electricity or running water, so this point seems banal and trite to me; there are MANY of us who would know what to do in a situation like this). I'm sure lots of people would react to an emergency just like these extremely uninteresting, untalented, uninspiring, indecisive people would act. I know the book is trying to point a finger or a mirror at the reader and get us to see ourselves in these people, but I don't relate.

Still being generous, I suppose there is something to be said for how much of our existence consists of eating, cooking, buying food, trying to find ways to entertain ourselves, being bored, filling that boredom with calories, thinking we deserve to overindulge on vacation, or if that fails, when the world is ending. That's a valid point, I guess, but that's not a story! People being bored and eating is not a story!

As for the extremely brief tension in discovering that the owners are black, I don't know who this guy thought was going to be surprised. The characters themselves aren't even surprised for long. Sure, they tossed around the idea that these were con artists trying to pull a fast one, but you'd probably think that no matter who knocked on the door in the middle of the night. Maybe he imagined that we white readers would relate to these surprised white characters, perhaps share their biases, but it seemed so heavy-handed to me, all I could see was the author's own bias against white people. He clearly thinks this is how white people--all of us--think. I believed the black characters were telling the truth long before the characters did. I'm not shocked by rich black people. Who is?? They're everywhere.

Anyway, this "social commentary" was only good for about 5 pages, then the issue was dropped. After the initial meeting, the characters could have been any color whatsoever and it wouldn't have affected the "story" in the slightest. Reviewers who are seeing something deep here about our society are just trying to seem important themselves. There is nothing significant about this novel. It's a bunch of cliches, set up, description, and little else.
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Zarathustra
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Post by Zarathustra »

It irritates me how the reviewers are fawning over this mediocre book.

This one writes:
Rumaan Alam’s ‘Leave the World Behind’ is a brilliant, suspenseful examination of race and class
There is no examination here. Just because the two families are different races and classes doesn't mean these facts have been in any way examined. It's just the setting. It allows you to imagine what they look like. That's it. It would be like saying that one character is blond, and suddenly this is a "brilliant examination of hair color and genetics." No, that's just what she looks like.

There's only about two sentences in the entire book where the characters think, "They don't look like the kind of people who would own such a nice house." Allowing white characters to think one or two cliche racist thoughts isn't "brilliant." It's a stereotype. I'd say it was insulting to white people, if it weren't so quickly dropped and so utterly unexamined.
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Post by Avatar »

LOL Sounds like it belongs in the "Bad Fiction" thread. :D

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Post by Damelon »

Zarathustra wrote:It irritates me how the reviewers are fawning over this mediocre book.

This one writes:
Rumaan Alam’s ‘Leave the World Behind’ is a brilliant, suspenseful examination of race and class
I think I'll stay away from that book. I did read the review and the main take away I got is not to apply for the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, where the reviewer heads the program.
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