Instead he lobs a prescient accusation: Faced with the end of the world, you wouldn’t do a damn thing. Why are you cringing? Why are you looking away?Īlam doesn’t dwell in the specificity of apocalypse, which has been the obsession of writers since the Flood. “Vacation was for being returned to your body.” All those functions that never seem to exist in fiction - “a noisy, wet revolution inside his stomach,” “that post-midnight binge pouring out of him in seconds” - are on artful display here, an intimacy that is also a challenge. “What a marvel to have a body, a thing that contained you,” Amanda thinks after a dip in the pool. The body itself becomes an unstable environment, a thing we have ruined or wasted, a domain completely out of our control. But the real issue is what these newcomers are escaping from: a mysterious blackout in New York City.ĭanger materializes, not from external threats, but from the breakdown of interior constructs. Clay and Amanda, not anticipating this intrusion or the particular station of their landlords turned guests - they’re Black and wealthy, how could this be? - castigate themselves for their illiberal reactions. The owners of the rental house arrive, seeking refuge. His wry observations about the structured chaos of vacation life might go on indefinitely - but then comes a knock at the door. They pack up the car (“not so new as to be luxurious or so old as to be bohemian”) and head out of town.Īlam’s two previous novels, “Rich and Pretty” and “That Kind of Mother,” have proved he’s gifted with an acidic wit, one he uses to break down contemporary life at the cellular level. “The Ultimate Escape,” the listing proclaimed before launching into “chummy advertising-speak” to describe the place.
There’s an Airbnb, far off the GPS-beaten path, “extraordinary and only $340 a day,” made all the more alluring by its lack of cellphone access. Rumaan Alam inhabits the head space of Amanda and Clay, denizens of New York City, parents of a teenage son and adolescent daughter, who slouch toward Long Island for summer vacation - only to discover that life as they know it is over.
The literary suspense of “Leave the World Behind” hinges on that familiar guilt-tinged longing for a vacation that never ends.
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