Should someone venture out and investigate? Should Amanda and Clay pack up their things and leave? Should someone fetch snacks? When a soul-rending, glass-cracking noise fills the sky, any pretence that life is normal is obliterated. The two families wake the morning after the New York blackout and vacillate. Yet once he has manoeuvred his cast into position, Alam seems unsure what to do with – or to – them. Only Alam could turn the contents of the family’s supermarket trolley into a cultural diagnosis. There’s indolent Clay, a tenured professor who “wanted to be asked to write for the New York Times Book Review but didn’t want to actually write anything” and striving Amanda, sunbathing on her ethically sourced beach blanket (“She had to pretend her way to being a good person”). And while there’s no ignoring the high-concept contrivance of the novel’s doorstep confrontation, there’s a sharp pleasure in watching Alam pull the expository strings.Īs in Alam’s previous fiction, the languid opening act of Leave the World Behind is a high-res cultural X-ray – liberal America’s white bones a-glowing. There’s such scope for viciousness, and for virtue, too, even if it is only signalled (“morality was vanity, in the end”). It’s a delicious conceit, a theatrically contained collision of power and prejudice. “This didn’t seem to her like the sort of house where black people lived,” Amanda thinks to herself. There’s been a city-wide blackout, they explain – a sudden and unexplained chaos – so they’ve driven out from Manhattan to their rural bolthole to seek refuge. GH stands at the door with his hands aloft, “a gesture that was either conciliatory or said Don’t shoot”. Only Alam could turn the contents of the family’s supermarket trolley into a cultural diagnosisīegging entry are George (GH) and Ruth Washington, a black couple in their 60s who claim to own the place. “They’d made a nice life for themselves, hadn’t they?” The children – Archie and Rose – are sun-kissed and sleeping their Brooklynite parents – Amanda and Clay – are basking in a post-coital glow. The walls are white, the picket fence is white, and inside the house is a white middle-class family of holidaymakers “pantomiming ownership”.

In a field surrounded by woods stands a lone brick house – “the very material the smartest piggy chose because it would keep him safest” – a luxurious Long Island vacation rental that is out of reach of mobile phone service, and out of earshot of the neighbours. Alam’s trope-heavy third novel has the makings of a farce, and the portents of a slaughter. When a midnight knock breaks the quiet of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, any one of these plot creatures might be waiting on the doorstep. It’s the narrative spark of children’s jokes, fairytales and campfire ghost stories, of drawing-room dramas and horror film bloodbaths.

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam