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A review by almassia
Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
1.0
Leave the World Behind is a spectacular failure at nearly every level of concept and execution. It is so utterly devoid of meaning, so amateurishly overwritten and shoddily edited, so completely bereft of plot or character or detail, so thoroughly lacking in emotion or empathy or--god help me--even pity, so entirely without the barest hint of thematic cohesiveness that it can make you ask questions like, "How did this get nominated for the National Book Award?" and "Is every book everyone is talking about like this?" and "If this trash fire inferno gets five star reviews on GoodReads and ends up on NPR and the New York Times book review, how can I ever trust anyone's opinions about books ever again?"
Every single aspect of this book's construction and execution is fundamentally broken. Each separate part feels like the worst, most cynical version of itself, and the inexplicable response of the "literary establishment" to what appears to me to be a clear executive misfire is astounding. This book is broken in nearly every way a book can be broken; in its current state, it would need to be entirely razed and rebuilt from one level above the concept to even approach being readable. It's so wholly terrible that I don't even know where to start reviewing it.
To start things simple, let’s go with the nuts and bolts: the writing. The writing in books in this genre is usually the draw--no one's ever accused John Updike of deploying a riveting story--but the writing in Leave the World Behind is sloppy, shoddy, and sophomoric. In nearly every chapter you can count multiple instances of the Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper or the below:
- MFA sentence pacing. You know: “(Pointed notation of noun), (descriptive, disjointed clause concerning noun, and either listings of adjectives or a simile or--even better--both).”
“their teenage arms, brown and lanky like sausages.”
- Improper tense shifts between clauses in the same sentence and sometimes between interrelated sentences that rely on tense agreement to read properly that does nothing but create unnecessary rereads (this line break does not shift the current action to the following day, it’s just a response to the above and then a digression, and the sentence following it will return to present day when the water is still running):
“‘Does the water run if the power goes out?’ Clay had no idea.
“It did not. The next day…” (pp. 193)
- similes so nonspecific that they don't actually count as similes, rendering the deployment of the image pointless:
“obedient as a certain kind of dog” (pp. 258)
- metaphors that are either self-contradictory or nonsensical (if not both at the same time) or jar you out of a moment of artistic connection with a basic lack of linguistic finesse;
- not knowing when to end a sentence early and cut an unnecessary final clause that weakens the impact:
“Amanda pushed open the doors to the back porch and looked down at the pool. She screamed her daughter’s name at the woods. The trees moved a little in the wind, but that was the only thing that happened.” (pp. 283)
- an over-reliance on spending dialogue attribution on pointless nonsense digressions when “he said” would work just fine:
“‘Archie is sick.’ Clay needed an answer.” (pp. 346)
“‘A bat?’ Clay pictured the flying mammal. 'A bat?’ He understood, then, but where would he get a bat? When had he last held a bat? Did they even have a baseball bat at home, and if they did, had they brought it on vacation? No, but when had they decided to forsake that American diversion? In their foyer on Baltic Street they had a clutch of umbrellas of varying degrees of broken, an extra windshield scraper, Archie’s lacrosse stick, some of those circulars, never asked for…” (pp. 48)
- wasting precious words explaining to us in narration what the dialogue makes self-evident:
“‘Does the water run if the power goes out?’ Clay had no idea.” (pp. 193)
- restating something blatantly obvious or irrelevant but couched in fake-artsy malapropism with an air of portentousness that unnecessarily bloats every paragraph and insults the reader’s intelligence (seriously, go touch your shower door sometime):
“Rose put her hand to the window. It was cold, as glass tended to be.” (pp. 191)
- observations by his omniscient narrator that are factually erroneous but stated as plainly as every other in- or out-universe fact in the story, such as the very real fact that on Long Island, water manes are pressure-driven and the water does run when the power goes out;
- non-demarcated continuity breaks in narrative voice that makes characters erroneously refer to themselves as if they are a third party observing the situation:
“Amanda should have screamed, but there was no scream. The fact that she was so quiet was somehow more unsettling.” (pp. 260)
- internalized viewpoint perspectives that are intended to be read in the thought-voice of a specific character that immediately hydroplane all over the spectrum of vocabulary and sentence structure in ways that are anachronistic and clearly unintentional:
“Still, he kind of wondered what was out there. Indian arrowheads? Money? Strangers? He’d found, in various woods he’d visited in his life, some weird shit. Three pages torn from a dirty magazine: a lady with old-fashioned hair, tan skin, immense boobs, pouting and bending her body this way and that.”
- adjectives used haphazardly or contradictorily so as to complicate the reading of an action or a setting, and not in a meaningful way, but in a clumsy way:
“green, green, rich, wet, thick, menacing, useless, impotent, angry, indifferent green” (pp. 271)
- creating sentences that are self-contradictory:
“Ruth could not move quite as fast as the younger woman, but she did.” (pp. 280)
- sentences that are simply inelegant, especially for being placed so late into the story:
“George was irritated. He needed all the information before he could decide what to do next.” (pp. 272)
- innumerable garden path sentences;
- cribbing incidental details but deploying them wrong, such as saying that this house is located in central-eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, but then giving it a 516 area code, which is exclusively used in a different county;
- observations that are either facile or erroneous or both, but not in a way that creates frisson, but in ways that communicate absolutely nothing and further disjoint the narrative voice:
“As a toddler, he’d wake with his face creased from the bedding, red from the exertion of rest” (pp. 197)
And my absolute personal favorite—a tendency I’m noticing more and more in these books that pretend to meaningfulness through specificity—an abundance of a kind of construction I’m going to call a "smokescreen sentence.”
A smokescreen sentence is an overly complex, multi-clausal sentence deployed to distract from the thing that’s actually happening in the scene because a) the action is incidental to either the paragraph it’s in or the scene at large; b) the over-description of the action is taking the place of actual forward momentum in the story (stacking the plot full of sentences, you could say; a structural passive voice); or c) it’s attempting to appeal to a certain kind of reader who’s overly sensitive to plain-spoken talk. Here’s a particularly egregious example:
“Washing her hands, Ruth could not hear the rain. Then she left the guest bath and saw the tumble of water and understood.” (pp. 190)
Let’s actually look at what’s happening in this sentence. Ruth washes her hands and goes out into the bedroom and notices it’s raining. That’s it. Let’s rewrite this so we eliminate all these needless words and silly exposition (and, hell, let’s add some incidental detail of our own that might be able to tell us something about our made-up version of this character):
Ruth noticed the rain as she stepped out of the guest bath, drying her hands on a starchy gold-rimmed towel.
There! It ain’t Shakespeare, but it works. A cleaner, clearer sentence, moving the action forward (and the reader forward) with the character’s forward movement, setting up action to come with the least amount of pointless blather.
But there’s really no reason for Alam to use this sentence: it’s clear that he has absolutely no interest in putting these characters in interesting situations and seeing what they do. If this book was actually written in plainspoken English we’d see it for what it is: a series of pointless meanderings from room to room and yard to yard, no one ever approaching a conflict point, no one having to make any decisions, no one ever having to examine themselves or act on their values (or betray them), not a character in this book doing a single thing to justify this book’s existence.
Part of the problem—though certainly not all of it—is Alam’s deployment of perspective. A story like this relies on misunderstandings and disagreements between the characters involved; people butting heads when they value different things, or don’t see eye-to-eye, or dredge up conflict because their panic or dread or selfishness or whatever prevents them from seeing past their own nose. That’s the lifeblood of these stories; it’s the kick that makes your hair stand on end watching a Tennessee Williams or Seamus Heaney play or reading an interrogation scene from Tana French. But it seems like Alam has somehow confused the narrative perspective for the perspective of the people in the story, because they never come into anything resembling honest conflict, and at times when they threaten to—when Amanda gets blinded by her self-absorption or G.H. falls back into the comfort of math or Ruth (far and away the best character in the book, but it’s a race among dullards) puts her own family first in ways that are actually relatable and concrete to her as a person (shock and awe, there)—it feels like the narrator steps in and (in place of letting it simmer with a confident “s/he said”) explains what the character actually means by that, and all of the other characters somehow only seem to hear it in the way the narrator tells us it was meant.
This is poison to this kind of story. Without segmented character perspectives like with a limited narrator—or the incredibly careful deployment of an omniscient narrator to draw out further complications from mutual self-ignorance and foster dramatic irony—no one character’s perspective on any other ever comes into view, and no meaningful conflict can ever develop. These aren’t real people; they’re lines of dialogue and incidental memories on a blank white stage.
There’s an artificiality to the directness of the characters’ experiences—their emotions never feel like they’re real and visceral to them, like they might actually guide them towards action. Instead, everyone is kept at a remove, ‘thinking of their father’ or something, or of once having been on a lake somewhere and seeing a dragonfly. But that’s not how people actually experience the world, and when these artificial moment-to-moment pseudo-memory-motivations are overexplained to us—or, worse, used as a substitute for actual real character building through dialogue or actions—it slams a barrier down between us and the characters and calls unintentional attention to its artifice.
The best chapter in this book—one that was actually enjoyable to read because it actually let these characters sit around and breathe and talk and actually scrape by each other a little—is Chapter 11, a short little diorama where G.H., Ruth, and Amanda sit by the pool and just talk. There’s an absolute minimum of the technical garbage that packs this book to the brim in every other chapter: it’s just three characters trying to understand one another across their vastly different experiences (with the book’s highest concentrations of “s/he said”s) and not entirely succeeding but not entirely failing, either. It was so fun to read that it its few pages blew by in what felt like a minute, but would that the rest of the book would take the lessons of this chapter and let its characters just be themselves. That book would be so much better. It might actually have something to say.
But this book doesn’t have anything to say. Instead, it has lists of food, descriptions of TV show box sets (but not of Playstation games, for some reason), lines and lines of far-distant memories that don't ever enter into the character's actions in the story (because, again, there are none), an adolescent’s misconception that how someone fucks tells you something deep and true about who they are (it doesn’t), pat recitations about black experience combined with an outright refusal to engage with any of the complex substance of the thing, a feint towards class consciousness that never manifests, a final chapter that cribs unselfconsciously from The Stand but without that book’s black sense of humor or sardonic verve with large-scale tragedy, a thorough and complete unwillingness to engage with any of its topics beyond the superficial, a complete lack of empathy that seems almost hateful, and the endless smug parading of this book’s self-importance all over every radio station and New Yorker and book review article you can find when it has absolutely nothing—fucking nothing—to say.
Maybe it’s cynical to say that the readers of this book who are giving it it glowing reviews—including all the critics and radio hosts and, yes, your local regulars and staff at the independent bookstore—aren’t actually reading books because they care about books. People want to be seen eating their vegetables, taking their daily dose of self-contrition, being educated and elevated by the inherent worth of the literary novel. But, god, why? I can’t think of anything more depressing. These kinds of books aren't worth your time—any of it, not a single breath, not a single precious second, of which we have so few and less every day. There are books out there that will tell you great stories and make you cry and break your heart and make you fall in love, and there are books that will turn your world inside out and turn your heart from stone to beating blood and there are books that will show you constellations of bright truth and there are books that will plunge you into the dark to show you the flicker that beckons at the farthest end: come, through here; this small light.
I want you to live a good life. Go read those books instead.
Every single aspect of this book's construction and execution is fundamentally broken. Each separate part feels like the worst, most cynical version of itself, and the inexplicable response of the "literary establishment" to what appears to me to be a clear executive misfire is astounding. This book is broken in nearly every way a book can be broken; in its current state, it would need to be entirely razed and rebuilt from one level above the concept to even approach being readable. It's so wholly terrible that I don't even know where to start reviewing it.
To start things simple, let’s go with the nuts and bolts: the writing. The writing in books in this genre is usually the draw--no one's ever accused John Updike of deploying a riveting story--but the writing in Leave the World Behind is sloppy, shoddy, and sophomoric. In nearly every chapter you can count multiple instances of the Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper or the below:
- MFA sentence pacing. You know: “(Pointed notation of noun), (descriptive, disjointed clause concerning noun, and either listings of adjectives or a simile or--even better--both).”
“their teenage arms, brown and lanky like sausages.”
- Improper tense shifts between clauses in the same sentence and sometimes between interrelated sentences that rely on tense agreement to read properly that does nothing but create unnecessary rereads (this line break does not shift the current action to the following day, it’s just a response to the above and then a digression, and the sentence following it will return to present day when the water is still running):
“‘Does the water run if the power goes out?’ Clay had no idea.
“It did not. The next day…” (pp. 193)
- similes so nonspecific that they don't actually count as similes, rendering the deployment of the image pointless:
“obedient as a certain kind of dog” (pp. 258)
- metaphors that are either self-contradictory or nonsensical (if not both at the same time) or jar you out of a moment of artistic connection with a basic lack of linguistic finesse;
- not knowing when to end a sentence early and cut an unnecessary final clause that weakens the impact:
“Amanda pushed open the doors to the back porch and looked down at the pool. She screamed her daughter’s name at the woods. The trees moved a little in the wind, but that was the only thing that happened.” (pp. 283)
- an over-reliance on spending dialogue attribution on pointless nonsense digressions when “he said” would work just fine:
“‘Archie is sick.’ Clay needed an answer.” (pp. 346)
“‘A bat?’ Clay pictured the flying mammal. 'A bat?’ He understood, then, but where would he get a bat? When had he last held a bat? Did they even have a baseball bat at home, and if they did, had they brought it on vacation? No, but when had they decided to forsake that American diversion? In their foyer on Baltic Street they had a clutch of umbrellas of varying degrees of broken, an extra windshield scraper, Archie’s lacrosse stick, some of those circulars, never asked for…” (pp. 48)
- wasting precious words explaining to us in narration what the dialogue makes self-evident:
“‘Does the water run if the power goes out?’ Clay had no idea.” (pp. 193)
- restating something blatantly obvious or irrelevant but couched in fake-artsy malapropism with an air of portentousness that unnecessarily bloats every paragraph and insults the reader’s intelligence (seriously, go touch your shower door sometime):
“Rose put her hand to the window. It was cold, as glass tended to be.” (pp. 191)
- observations by his omniscient narrator that are factually erroneous but stated as plainly as every other in- or out-universe fact in the story, such as the very real fact that on Long Island, water manes are pressure-driven and the water does run when the power goes out;
- non-demarcated continuity breaks in narrative voice that makes characters erroneously refer to themselves as if they are a third party observing the situation:
“Amanda should have screamed, but there was no scream. The fact that she was so quiet was somehow more unsettling.” (pp. 260)
- internalized viewpoint perspectives that are intended to be read in the thought-voice of a specific character that immediately hydroplane all over the spectrum of vocabulary and sentence structure in ways that are anachronistic and clearly unintentional:
“Still, he kind of wondered what was out there. Indian arrowheads? Money? Strangers? He’d found, in various woods he’d visited in his life, some weird shit. Three pages torn from a dirty magazine: a lady with old-fashioned hair, tan skin, immense boobs, pouting and bending her body this way and that.”
- adjectives used haphazardly or contradictorily so as to complicate the reading of an action or a setting, and not in a meaningful way, but in a clumsy way:
“green, green, rich, wet, thick, menacing, useless, impotent, angry, indifferent green” (pp. 271)
- creating sentences that are self-contradictory:
“Ruth could not move quite as fast as the younger woman, but she did.” (pp. 280)
- sentences that are simply inelegant, especially for being placed so late into the story:
“George was irritated. He needed all the information before he could decide what to do next.” (pp. 272)
- innumerable garden path sentences;
- cribbing incidental details but deploying them wrong, such as saying that this house is located in central-eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, but then giving it a 516 area code, which is exclusively used in a different county;
- observations that are either facile or erroneous or both, but not in a way that creates frisson, but in ways that communicate absolutely nothing and further disjoint the narrative voice:
“As a toddler, he’d wake with his face creased from the bedding, red from the exertion of rest” (pp. 197)
And my absolute personal favorite—a tendency I’m noticing more and more in these books that pretend to meaningfulness through specificity—an abundance of a kind of construction I’m going to call a "smokescreen sentence.”
A smokescreen sentence is an overly complex, multi-clausal sentence deployed to distract from the thing that’s actually happening in the scene because a) the action is incidental to either the paragraph it’s in or the scene at large; b) the over-description of the action is taking the place of actual forward momentum in the story (stacking the plot full of sentences, you could say; a structural passive voice); or c) it’s attempting to appeal to a certain kind of reader who’s overly sensitive to plain-spoken talk. Here’s a particularly egregious example:
“Washing her hands, Ruth could not hear the rain. Then she left the guest bath and saw the tumble of water and understood.” (pp. 190)
Let’s actually look at what’s happening in this sentence. Ruth washes her hands and goes out into the bedroom and notices it’s raining. That’s it. Let’s rewrite this so we eliminate all these needless words and silly exposition (and, hell, let’s add some incidental detail of our own that might be able to tell us something about our made-up version of this character):
Ruth noticed the rain as she stepped out of the guest bath, drying her hands on a starchy gold-rimmed towel.
There! It ain’t Shakespeare, but it works. A cleaner, clearer sentence, moving the action forward (and the reader forward) with the character’s forward movement, setting up action to come with the least amount of pointless blather.
But there’s really no reason for Alam to use this sentence: it’s clear that he has absolutely no interest in putting these characters in interesting situations and seeing what they do. If this book was actually written in plainspoken English we’d see it for what it is: a series of pointless meanderings from room to room and yard to yard, no one ever approaching a conflict point, no one having to make any decisions, no one ever having to examine themselves or act on their values (or betray them), not a character in this book doing a single thing to justify this book’s existence.
Part of the problem—though certainly not all of it—is Alam’s deployment of perspective. A story like this relies on misunderstandings and disagreements between the characters involved; people butting heads when they value different things, or don’t see eye-to-eye, or dredge up conflict because their panic or dread or selfishness or whatever prevents them from seeing past their own nose. That’s the lifeblood of these stories; it’s the kick that makes your hair stand on end watching a Tennessee Williams or Seamus Heaney play or reading an interrogation scene from Tana French. But it seems like Alam has somehow confused the narrative perspective for the perspective of the people in the story, because they never come into anything resembling honest conflict, and at times when they threaten to—when Amanda gets blinded by her self-absorption or G.H. falls back into the comfort of math or Ruth (far and away the best character in the book, but it’s a race among dullards) puts her own family first in ways that are actually relatable and concrete to her as a person (shock and awe, there)—it feels like the narrator steps in and (in place of letting it simmer with a confident “s/he said”) explains what the character actually means by that, and all of the other characters somehow only seem to hear it in the way the narrator tells us it was meant.
This is poison to this kind of story. Without segmented character perspectives like with a limited narrator—or the incredibly careful deployment of an omniscient narrator to draw out further complications from mutual self-ignorance and foster dramatic irony—no one character’s perspective on any other ever comes into view, and no meaningful conflict can ever develop. These aren’t real people; they’re lines of dialogue and incidental memories on a blank white stage.
There’s an artificiality to the directness of the characters’ experiences—their emotions never feel like they’re real and visceral to them, like they might actually guide them towards action. Instead, everyone is kept at a remove, ‘thinking of their father’ or something, or of once having been on a lake somewhere and seeing a dragonfly. But that’s not how people actually experience the world, and when these artificial moment-to-moment pseudo-memory-motivations are overexplained to us—or, worse, used as a substitute for actual real character building through dialogue or actions—it slams a barrier down between us and the characters and calls unintentional attention to its artifice.
The best chapter in this book—one that was actually enjoyable to read because it actually let these characters sit around and breathe and talk and actually scrape by each other a little—is Chapter 11, a short little diorama where G.H., Ruth, and Amanda sit by the pool and just talk. There’s an absolute minimum of the technical garbage that packs this book to the brim in every other chapter: it’s just three characters trying to understand one another across their vastly different experiences (with the book’s highest concentrations of “s/he said”s) and not entirely succeeding but not entirely failing, either. It was so fun to read that it its few pages blew by in what felt like a minute, but would that the rest of the book would take the lessons of this chapter and let its characters just be themselves. That book would be so much better. It might actually have something to say.
But this book doesn’t have anything to say. Instead, it has lists of food, descriptions of TV show box sets (but not of Playstation games, for some reason), lines and lines of far-distant memories that don't ever enter into the character's actions in the story (because, again, there are none), an adolescent’s misconception that how someone fucks tells you something deep and true about who they are (it doesn’t), pat recitations about black experience combined with an outright refusal to engage with any of the complex substance of the thing, a feint towards class consciousness that never manifests, a final chapter that cribs unselfconsciously from The Stand but without that book’s black sense of humor or sardonic verve with large-scale tragedy, a thorough and complete unwillingness to engage with any of its topics beyond the superficial, a complete lack of empathy that seems almost hateful, and the endless smug parading of this book’s self-importance all over every radio station and New Yorker and book review article you can find when it has absolutely nothing—fucking nothing—to say.
Maybe it’s cynical to say that the readers of this book who are giving it it glowing reviews—including all the critics and radio hosts and, yes, your local regulars and staff at the independent bookstore—aren’t actually reading books because they care about books. People want to be seen eating their vegetables, taking their daily dose of self-contrition, being educated and elevated by the inherent worth of the literary novel. But, god, why? I can’t think of anything more depressing. These kinds of books aren't worth your time—any of it, not a single breath, not a single precious second, of which we have so few and less every day. There are books out there that will tell you great stories and make you cry and break your heart and make you fall in love, and there are books that will turn your world inside out and turn your heart from stone to beating blood and there are books that will show you constellations of bright truth and there are books that will plunge you into the dark to show you the flicker that beckons at the farthest end: come, through here; this small light.
I want you to live a good life. Go read those books instead.