The Bangladeshi-American author Rumaan Alam wrote Leave the World Behind just before the Covid-19 pandemic. The novel was published in November 2020 and portrays apocalyptic apprehensions stirred by global crises.

Now adapted as a Netflix film, the book blurs together fears about disease, climate change, racism, geopolitical strife and social collapse in a narrative that extends beyond the boundaries of post-apocalyptic fiction. Alam’s world, teetering on the brink of disaster, echoes our own times.

The plot follows a white family briefly escaping their ordinary lives for a lavish vacation on Long Island, only to be thrust into an unfolding but unclear crisis. Alam introduces Clay, an English and media studies professor with intellectual ambitions, and Amanda, an account director engrossed in corporate storytelling. Their teenage son and daughter represent the younger generation, grappling with physical changes and medical problems while orienting themselves via stories from books, film and TV.

The family’s retreat is disrupted by their landlords, G.H. and Ruth Washington, a rich older Black couple. Their sudden appearance challenges the family’s prejudices, creates uneasy alliances, and forces a confrontation with mysterious world events. Amanda’s initial suspicion of the Washingtons as house intruders or con artists highlights her genteel racism, a reflection of wider societal rifts.

The novel’s critique incorporates consumerism, accentuated in moments of crisis, where the instinct to purchase and hoard reflects social malaise. Alam’s observation in an interview, that Americans responded to the pandemic by going shopping, shows consumer culture’s grip on modern life.

Indeed, in Alam’s story world, “things” are “falling apart.” This allusion to Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, written during the Spanish Flu pandemic, indicates that, amid planetary crises, old ways soon implode.

The famous lines are “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” In both the poem and Alam’s novel, there is a sense that cataclysmic change is slouching to be born. At one point, Clay thinks, “Less than an hour, and everything was changed.” What if we avoid the usual Yeatsian emphasis on falling apart and making anew to instead focus on things?

‘Thing theory’ scholars such as Bill Brown argue that we do not only possess things, but they possess us back. The ultimate possessive, possessible thing of the 21st century is the smartphone, with its “seductive glow.” Amanda worries about the younger generation, as her kids are over-reliant on their phones and can’t “see the world anymore but through that prism.”

Deep down, though, she knows this is also true of herself and her peers. Grown-ups, too, suffer “withdrawal” when unable to check their phones, because they are “addicted.” Clay can no longer find his way without Google Maps. And the landlord G.H. laments, “We’re four adults who don’t know how to … do much.” When the internet goes down, their dependency on technology augurs problems in all areas of their lives: physical, spiritual and intellectual.

Alam inundates his readers with things, intermixing the coveted and the worthless, the fresh and the decomposing, the well-placed and the misplaced. He bombards us with lists of consumables, garbage and even Amanda’s bodily matter, “ropy and fibrous, beneath her skin.” The narrative is strewn with references to Entenmann’s crumb-topped doughnuts, pool floats, brass objets d’art, pendant lamps, lacrosse sticks, PlayStations and a $4,000 tumble dryer.

In a remarkable passage, we shadow Amanda around a grocery store as she does the big shop for their week away. Fifteen sentences begin with the words “She bought”, signalling Amanda’s consumer identity, family dynamics and social class. Abundance and even voluptuary indulgence is encapsulated by the word “tumescent” describing courgettes.

Underlying the variety and quantity of items is not only excess but an anxiety to fill every possible need or want. Alam challenges Amanda’s self-assurance as a “politically virtuous” consumer, by showing her secret extravagances and familial concessions.

The novel’s Gatsbyesque setting in the Hamptons, broadcasting wealth and exclusivity, allows examination of the disparities and contradictions in American life. Alam uses this location to dissect the service industry, particularly the luxury market that caters to the elite. This is intimated through the family’s temporary consumption of a lifestyle that is not theirs. Alam highlights the performative nature of social status and the fragility of economic structures that support the high life.

Clay meets a weeping woman on the road when he is lost and hoping for guidance. She wears a “white polo shirt and khaki pants”, an outfit which points to a “uniform”. Clues are dropped that she is the Washingtons’ Honduran cleaner Rosa but, like so much in the novel, this is left open-ended.

We view the woman’s “broad, indigenous” face through Clay’s eyes. He is monolingual and finds himself assailed with a torrent of Spanish, intermixed with occasional English words. Clay cannot or does not try to understand who she is, what she is saying, or what has caused her distress. After a token disclaimer, he confesses in an internal monologue that her language sounds “like gibberish.” The service industry worker, almost invisible even to her Black employers, has been reduced to a thing, her words blocked out as mere noise.

After abandoning her on the roadside and eventually finding the house, Clay does not tell the others about her, for the woman “didn’t matter. He could barely remember what she looked like.” Yet the semi-omniscient narrator rebuts this dismissal with a parenthetical aside that she is from a culture of “ancient blood, timeless dignity.”

The service worker is from the Meso-American region whose ancestors “discovered corn, tobacco, chocolate” before Spanish colonisation reduced this civilisation to “piles of rubble in jungles.” Now her people work in agriculture or on the landscaping and housekeeping of Hamptons mansions. Clay’s behaviour shows how capitalist reliance on items and amenities relates to dehumanisation, as he objectifies the woman as a nameless, voiceless entity.

Leave the World Behind is a snapshot of the anxieties and challenges of modern life, magnified in a disaster. This is not just a novel about a family’s encounter with the unknown, but a broader commentary on what happens when things — both goods and services — fall apart.

The columnist is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York and author of three books.

X: @clarachambara

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 5th, 2024