Why are you cringing? Why are you looking away?. All those functions that never seem to exist in fiction are on artful display here, an intimacy that is also a challenge. His wry observations about the structured chaos of vacation life might go on indefinitely - but then comes a knock at the door.
Read Full Review >Īlam’s two previous novels have proved he’s gifted with an acidic wit, one he uses to break down contemporary life at the cellular level. When a writer seems to be more interested in describing shallowness than in diving into the mess of human emotion, the result can be fiction that circles around urgent social questions without really examining them. This slender book feels like half a novel, one that might work better if it dissected human motivation as assiduously as it does shopping habits, or if it tried to pull its seemingly random nuggets of terror into a cohesive shape. But I was left wishing he had marshaled his talents in the service of something more ambitious. The verisimilitude with which he depicts a certain social world is impressive. Alam is a gifted writer I devoured Leave the World Behind in a long gulp on an insomniac night. At the same time, the stereotype-heavy characters combine with the lack of plot development to give this book the feeling of a set piece rather than a fully realized work of fiction. Despite its appearance, Leave the World Behind isn’t a book about a global disaster it’s a book about racism-or, more precisely, white entitlement.As the novelist, Alam controls the narrative it’s his prerogative to spotlight white ignorance and entitlement. Alam is at his best when lavishing attention on the texture and details of a certain style of privileged contemporary urban life, rendering it with a Chuck Close–style hyperrealism that magnifies its flaws. Both the advantages and disadvantages of this approach are evident in Leave the World Behind, Alam’s third novel, which is an odd hybrid of thriller and social satire. Tensions are left unexplored paths for development are foreclosed. With chapters often only three or four pages long and tending to cut away just as a scene starts to get complicated, the effect is disconcerting, destabilizing. Lacking the capacity for deep reflection, his characters drift along in their bubbles, so perfectly self-absorbed that the other people in their lives are all but invisible, except to the extent that they function as projections. His interest lies in taxonomies of race and class, not in generating the reader’s empathy or evoking an emotional response. He has an interior barometer exquisitely calibrated to signifiers of social class. For Alam, who writes about his characters as if he were a medical student dissecting a cadaver, psychological depth is not the point.
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