A thing that contained you

There's something frustrating about Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam. It's so compulsively readable, so well blurbed and generally highly regarded, so polished — it left me a little cold. It feels overly manufactured, contrived; the writing is near flawless, but lacks humanity.

Maybe that's deliberate, maybe that's for effect. I could rethink my feeling as a manifestation of one of the book's themes.

It's not about the disaster; in fact, we never learn what the disaster truly consists of. It's about the people. It's about people reverting to an animal state and the effort required to prevent that from happening. This would make an excellent bookclub book. There's race and social class and a lot of privilege. 

A middle-aged couple and their two teenagers head out of Brooklyn to some nearby middle of nowhere. They're not wholly likeable people, but they're recognizable. Maybe they should end their marriage. Maybe they escape into work to feel needed and important. Maybe their kids have issues.

There's something off-putting about the way Alam writes about bodies. I found those passages jarring; they didn't fit with the rest of the story, a sudden intrusion of nipples and dicks. Not tender or sad, not erotic or disgusting. Realistic but empty. (Was it by design? I can't tell.)

Her fingers strayed to the parts of herself where they felt best, in search not of some internal pleasure but something more cerebral: the confirmation that she, her shoulders, her nipples, her elbows, all of it, existed. What a marvel, to have a body, a thing that contained you. Vacation was for being returned to your body.

(Is that what vacation is for? Maybe.)

Then one night, there's a knock on the door — the owners of the Airbnb. They're older, wealthy, and black. And they claim the power's out in New York City, that the city is falling into chaos. Would you trust the strangers at the door?

No tv, no phone connection — satellites are down. No news of the outside world. No planes overhead. No one nearby. 

(I remember April, when I turned off the television and stepped outside. Was it better not to know anything? Yes, for days at a time. Going off-grid in the middles of the city, the only way to maintain sanity. The birds chirped loudly for a while.)

The animals, meanwhile, are following their instinct. The deer are migrating. Flamingoes are reconning in the pool. Somehow, they intuit what to do. The people have more difficulty. It's a struggle to maintain the facade of civility. Predictably, it's the pubescent daughter, lost in the fairytale woods, that leads them back to themselves. (Is she most in tune with her animal self?)

Excerpt.

I couldn't put this book down, but I never really connected with it either.

Maybe no one, however much in love, cares about the minutiae of someone else's life.