"Leave the World Behind"

 

"An aerial image shows the remains of an armored
Los Angeles Police Department tractor-trailer
after fireworks exploded Wednesday evening." (source)

In the image from the L.A.Times, you can see the result of a fireworks explosion. The fireworks had been confiscated and placed in a containment truck. The expected containment didn't work, and you can see how the truck disintegrated in the blast, which shook the surrounding neighborhood, broke windows, and left some homes "red tagged" because they were no longer safe. People nearby thought it was a bomb or an earthquake.

This week, our lives are full of big and little catastrophes, from hundreds of deaths in the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest to homes and roads flooded by extraordinary rainstorms in the Detroit area where I live. Not to mention the giant catastrophe of a pandemic that changed life all over the planet and isn't over yet. The net result is that we live with constant dread. As Paul Krugman says: "if you aren’t terrified, you aren’t paying attention." (Yes, Krugman's comment was in a different context, but it applies to all kinds of things.)

This week, I read a book about the end of the world. It was fiction, but the disaster story also included a big and unexplained explosion as well as a horrible number of things that make one think of real life on a crazy planet. Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam  takes place in a remote part of Long Island where New Yorkers go to escape everything about the lives they lead in the crowded city.

Shopping, possessions, brand names, status, making money, being someone, going the right places -- these are their values. The characters who face the apocalypse together are typical New York Americans, at least typical of fiction. Although they are all said to have professions, there's little about them that distinguishes the college professor from the financial adviser or from the school administrator. Their educations and jobs don't define them, their material lives do. The four adults and two children in the book are completely oblivious before the unexplained catastrophe and unprepared to deal with it. And in a way -- they don't deal with it, it just swamps them.

The novel starts when a family of four from Brooklyn are settling into a relatively isolated rental house a 20 minute drive from some unspecified beachside town. The house is very luxurious, and would be far beyond their means except as a brief vacation getaway. The furnishings and kitchen set-up impress the renters. 

The first thing they need is to stock this beautiful kitchen with food, and the wife goes into town to a supermarket. Clearly, the choices she makes define her. The following is long, but I think it shows what kind of book this is:

"The store was frigid, brightly lit, wide-aisled. She bought yogurt and blueberries. She bought sliced turkey, whole-grain bread, that pebbly mud-colored mustard, and mayonnaise. She bought potato chips and tortilla chips and jarred salsa full of cilantro, even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. She bought organic hot dogs and inexpensive buns and the same ketchup everyone bought. She bought cold, hard lemons and seltzer and Tito’s vodka and two bottles of nine-dollar red wine. She bought dried spaghetti and salted butter and a head of garlic. She bought thick-cut bacon and a two-pound bag of flour and twelve-dollar maple syrup in a faceted glass bottle like a tacky perfume. She bought a pound of ground coffee, so potent she could smell it through the vacuum seal, and size 4 coffee filters made of recycled paper. If you care? She cared! She bought a three-pack of paper towels, and a spray-on sunscreen, and aloe, because the children had inherited their father’s pale skin. She bought those fancy crackers you put out when there were guests, and Ritz crackers, which everyone liked best, and crumbly white cheddar cheese and extra-garlicky hummus and an unsliced hard salami and those carrots that are tumbled around until they’re the size of a child’s fingers. She bought packages of cookies from Pepperidge Farm and three pints of Ben & Jerry’s politically virtuous ice cream and a Duncan Hines boxed mix for a yellow cake and a Duncan Hines tub of chocolate frosting with a red plastic lid, because parenthood had taught her that on a vacation’s inevitable rainy day you could while away an hour by baking a boxed cake. She bought two tumescent zucchini, a bag of snap peas, a bouquet of curling kale so green it was almost black. She bought a bottle of olive oil and a box of Entenmann’s crumb-topped doughnuts, a bunch of bananas and a bag of white nectarines and two plastic packages of strawberries, a dozen brown eggs, a plastic box of prewashed spinach, a plastic container of olives, some heirloom tomatoes wrapped in crinkling cellophane, marbled green and shocking orange. She bought three pounds of ground beef and two packages of hamburger buns, their bottoms dusty with flour, and a jar of locally made pickles. She bought four avocados and three limes and a sandy bundle of cilantro even though Archie refused to eat cilantro. It was more than two hundred dollars, but never mind. (pp. 11-12). 

Soon after dinner, the owners of the house show up in a panic, having fled from a New York city that's in the worst blackout imaginable. There's a scene where the white people (the renters) don't trust the black people (the owners), which is clearly central to the author's thinking, though I didn't find it that wonderfully done. Then there's the long decline as they hear a huge explosion or other noise and the situation deteriorates. The end of the world is clearly upon them, though I didn't find it that wonderfully done. The author never reveals what exactly caused the disaster, though he parenthetically tells how it was worldwide and very fatal. I didn't find that so wonderful either. 

But the shopping is superb. The author in my opinion is better at social satire than he is at dystopian end-of-the world writing. I would like it better if it hadn't been so vague; however, in an interview, he said: “If anything, I have learned to frustrate the reader. I hope people realise that you can’t make sense of it. You wouldn’t. And that is what is chilling.” This is from a very fascinating interview in the Guardian (Rumaan Alam: "What we are experiencing now is part of a bigger moment") which inspired me to read the book. I'm not sorry I read it, despite what I see as its flaws.

Review © 2021 mae sander, images as credited.