The reader is meant to feel a bit of discomfort there because, of course, a knock at the door late at night in a place where you're not expecting to be, it feels suspicious, it feels threatening. When a writer seems to be more interested in describing shallowness than in diving into the mess of human emotion, the result can be fiction that circles around urgent social questions without really examining them.On the novel's opening chapters, in which the white family who is renting the house opens the door in the middle of the night to an older Black couple who claim to be the home's owners This slender book feels like half a novel, one that might work better if it dissected human motivation as assiduously as it does shopping habits, or if it tried to pull its seemingly random nuggets of terror into a cohesive shape. But I was left wishing he had marshaled his talents in the service of something more ambitious. The verisimilitude with which he depicts a certain social world is impressive.

Alam is a gifted writer I devoured Leave the World Behind in a long gulp on an insomniac night. At the same time, the stereotype-heavy characters combine with the lack of plot development to give this book the feeling of a set piece rather than a fully realized work of fiction. Despite its appearance, Leave the World Behind isn’t a book about a global disaster it’s a book about racism-or, more precisely, white entitlement.As the novelist, Alam controls the narrative it’s his prerogative to spotlight white ignorance and entitlement. Alam is at his best when lavishing attention on the texture and details of a certain style of privileged contemporary urban life, rendering it with a Chuck Close–style hyperrealism that magnifies its flaws. Both the advantages and disadvantages of this approach are evident in Leave the World Behind, Alam’s third novel, which is an odd hybrid of thriller and social satire. Tensions are left unexplored paths for development are foreclosed. With chapters often only three or four pages long and tending to cut away just as a scene starts to get complicated, the effect is disconcerting, destabilizing. Lacking the capacity for deep reflection, his characters drift along in their bubbles, so perfectly self-absorbed that the other people in their lives are all but invisible, except to the extent that they function as projections. His interest lies in taxonomies of race and class, not in generating the reader’s empathy or evoking an emotional response.

He has an interior barometer exquisitely calibrated to signifiers of social class. For Alam, who writes about his characters as if he were a medical student dissecting a cadaver, psychological depth is not the point.

Leave the world behind book review