scott_wilson_kc 's review for:

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

3.0

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This starts rough: hollow, clunky writing that positions the novel as a Fifty Shades of White Noise DeLillo pastiche. Once there's a knock at the door (a device so hoary that Alam seems to be trolling you), things begin to cohere. The result is a fairly effective device for delivering several layers of middle-class dread: property, parenthood, consumerism, racial sensitivity. Is that enough? Is the blurriness of every character by design, the better to project oneself onto them and feel their fear more acutely? Or will their two-dimensional construction keep me from remembering anything about this book later other than being glad that its particular end-times scenario (which is, by dint of its better-executed vagueness, in a pretty high percentile of stomach-churning believability, as this kind of novel goes) is not yet underway? I really don't know.