Rumaan Alam’s Leave The World Behind (2020)
Alam is very skilled and this is almost a great book. The reasons it’s not quite have to do with Alam’s infatuation with his own cleverness – a sense of teasing, a sense of using his characters as marionettes to enact a somewhat moralistic allegory that Alam only elliptically discloses.
How I’d really think about Leave The World Behind is two very different books grafted on top of one another. The first book is a stylistic tour de force – the bougie family enjoying the very last moments of civilization in its full consumeristic splendor. This section is written in painterly, pointillist detail, very much like ‘La Grand Jatte’ or Richard Hamilton’s ‘Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing,’ each movement of their vacation its own set piece. Stylistically, it’s what I’d think of as the American buoyant style, which runs through Saul Bellow, Richard Ford, and (in ironical form) Nicholson Baker – peacocking, priapic writing about the mundane underlaid with a sense of boundless optimism. And Alam carries this out as well as any writer has in a very long time. At the beach, the family’s patriarch Clay reads “the kind of book he normally had, a slender and unclassifiable critique of the way we live now, the sort of thing it’s impossible to read near naked in the sun but important to have read, for his work.” And, meanwhile, the lifeguards sit at their posts, the ideal barrier between life and death, “mouths perfected by orthodontia, unquestioning eyes behind cheap plastic sunglasses.”
What’s not to love about description like this? – intelligent, wide-ranging, lyrical, with a sly, perfectly poker-faced humor (the pièce de resistance, actually, is the comma before ‘for his work’ – that little hesitation, that point of entry into Clay’s mind in the subtle, critical distinction that makes it clear that all the reading in Clay’s life, come to think of it, is meant to serve its larger purpose as credentialing him for his work). This is the same style as in Ford or Baker, although a little more cartoonish here, the sense of a soulful, somewhat morose narrator rubbing his eyes in disbelief at the consumerist reality of the American imperium and trying to say that, yes, this may be shallow and ridiculous, but it is nonetheless beautiful. And there’s a moment, just after the beach, when the family returns to their vacation house and the husband and wife, Clay and Amanda, think to themselves, “They’d made a nice life for themselves, hadn’t they?” – and, as Alam constructs it, this is not so mocking as it might seem to be: beneath their class pretensions, their deeply-laid complacency, Clay and Amanda are his characters and Alam is in some sense proud of them.
And then, grafted onto that descriptive novel and gradually pushing it aside, is a novel of menace – the end of the world approaching with a horror film’s inevitability, the characters thrashing about to come to grips with it. This second novel is well-executed as well – the moment of the noise is particularly chilling – but its features are somewhat pre-determined and it leaves Alam less to work with. The explanation of the apocalypse is kept deliberately vague but is ultimately standard – “a plane most people didn’t know existed, a plane designed to do unspeakable things, heading off to do them” – and the aphorisms Alam draws upon to explain the collective state of mind at the terminus of civilization are eloquent but the kinds of things that one is used to hearing: “There was no real structure to prevent chaos, there was only a collective faith in order”; “Everyone had ceded to things just falling apart.”
The most interesting aspect of the novel’s second half, and which separates it from the usual post-apocalyptic fare – The Leftovers, Before The Fall – is the utter, all-encompassing passivity of the characters, even to make any sort of inward, moral turn. Clay discovers, at the moment of truth, that he is weak and cowardly, G.H. realizes that his life-long faith in reason and information is unavailing, Archie, 14-years-old and in the prime of health, notices suddenly that his body is betraying him, but the point is that these bitter epiphanies are actually completely unimportant – “they were bad men they told themselves,” writes Alam of some offstage characters, “not knowing how little it mattered whether you spent your life being good or bad.”
In other words, the narrative moves into a theological framework in which agency itself does not exist. The secret joy of the end of the world, in the Western tradition, is that it is Judgment Day, the moment when the verdicts are all read. But, here, everybody acts as their conditioning instructs them to. Clay’s cowardice is taken with surprisingly good grace – Alam points out graciously that it is part of what makes him, actually, a good partner for Amanda who is no paragon herself] 12-year-old Rose, true to form of the 21st century novel in which strong, spirited heroines always save the day, goes pluckily off to a neighbor’s house to try to work out a solution, but, as Alam notes, Rose has simply read too many adventure books – “she knew how this story would end” – and her brave trip across the woods has no benefit and simply sends the adults back home into a fresh panic.
The machinery of the novel – the heavily-determined, pointillist skewering of the opening half, the even more determined chain of inevitabilities that accompany the latter half’s end of the world – creates, then, a real sense of existential terror, of what it’s like to face apocalypse from our current collective mindset, strictly atheistic and materialistic: with our last breaths a kind of loving tribute to our own creature comforts, a very awful anxiety about not being able to check our phones or turn on the TV, and in place of any belief just a kind of reflex fidelity towards the system, which turns out to be the culpable actor and is incapable of any actual help. But if Alam has some vision of moral authority in mind – some way to reclaim ownership over our own fate – he keeps that carefully hidden. And the novel’s conclusion turns out be oddly buoyant, a Nicholson Bakerish paradise of the 12-year-old girl completely alone in a stranger’s house, surrounded by all the goodies of American capitalism (the box set of Friends, etc, etc). The implication – speaking here from the higher level of Alam’s artistic purpose – is that the whole end-of-the-world thing is really just a plot device. What it does is to show us just how useless we are, how we really don’t amount to much - “We’re just four adults who don’t know how to do much at all,” G.H. remarks drily at some stage - and that it’s not at all clear that there’s any path back from that sort of craven dependency. Alam’s overriding point is that that may not matter much – Clay can “contend with his own weakness” while pouring himself another drink; Rose ultimately has the right idea of watching through the box set, of returning as much as possible to the world of the sensory pleasures. From the perspective of the history of literature, it’s as if the old post-war American spirit (the Saul Bellow novel) takes on the full force of the Pinterish critique – menace as the permanent, predominant feature of the ‘stable’ life; also the political critique of the absolute, abhorrent criminality of the American imperial enterprise – and shrugs it off, decides that the creature comforts are what matter after all. (What will you do if the world is about to end? Well, have a drink, put something on the tube.)
So a very impressive and nearly great novel that’s right on the bullseye of nearly all of our collective discontents. But the more I thought about it, the less I liked it. I had the feeling that Alam was holding too much back – keeping his own perspective out of it, allowing his characters to remain silhouettes – and that what he was really interested in were passages with a density of brilliance. The Richard Hamilton painting above isn’t a bad way of illustrating the overall effect of Leave the World Behind – very smart, very funny, but also a bit inert and overly concerned with taking the piss out of its subjects as opposed to genuinely letting them fight for some kind of humanity.
Edward St Aubyn’s Double Blind (2021)
Worth a skip. A cocktail party in the shape of a novel. The idea here is that the characters don’t so much develop or have stories as that they circulate around, and as a reader you visit with so-and-so who has a new rich boyfriend, with so-and-so who will unfortunately talk to you about top soil for some time (but is interesting if you pay close attention!), with so-and-so who, movingly, has a brain tumor but is being mordantly witty about it. There’s so much cleverness here - quips on a wide variety of subject matter - and it’s a shame that it really amounts to nothing at all, just feels like so much chit-chat between rounds of canapés.
The nice way to view Double Blind is that it’s an attempt to impose a degree of civility over an increasingly unhinged era. Read St. Aubyn and there’s a terrific sense of continuity with something like Vile Bodies, a feeling (which I admit to finding very comforting) that all of our current issues of hand-wringing import, Trumpism, the advent of the tech dystopia, environmental collapse, the utter indifference of the hyper-rich, are just so many fresh annoyances, fuel for the witty banter of some PLU party somewhere in London, and that, as ever, the way to deal with anything (whether it’s pregnancy, a brain tumor, global warming) is to be as untouched by it as possible, to return immediately to the never-ending contest of who can have the driest sense of humor.
The less-nice way of viewing it is that this is the lifestyle to which St Aubyn was assigned by birth - before he got into heroin, cracked up, got interesting - and now that he’s told his story, exorcized his demons, he’s back to writing how his Head Masters would have expected him to write: mildly interesting word play and elegant humor on subjects of contemporary relevance. In other words, he’s a high-class writer at the phone-it-in phase of his career, and any interest that one could take in Double Blind is really more like checking in on an old friend - the beloved author of the Patrick Melrose novels - who is currently in a rut in their lives.
Anyway. There are some nice lines. Snippets of arch British humor - “Sebastian had encrypted his secrets, using a system he had taken the further precaution of not knowing how to decipher”; “he drank with the abandon of a man recently ejected from a dry country”; “he was by now onboard for more or less any heresy.” And then a lapidary, rhythmic elegance to virtually everything St Aubyn writes, which he is capable of employing to write more or less sincerely about the state of the world: “The world is divided between the mediocrity of Committees, the paralysis of checks and balances, and the merciful megalomania of the rich, everybody else is just shouting in a bell jar while the air gets sucked out”; or (in the vision of a schizophrenic character) “The whole sky was a mirror, like a silver dish mirror keeping us warm until death makes a meal out of us.”
There is the sense that, underneath the straitjacket of St Aubyn’s own prose and wit, there is a more compelling, more serious novel that is attempting to get out - and, which, had it been written, would probably violate the sacred taste precepts of the people likely to show up at his book party. That unwritten book is a sideswipe at ‘the melting citadel of science’ and an affirmation of the New Age. The sense is that St Aubyn’s core characters - the public school crowd - are a bit at a loss when faced with the actual difficult issues, wayward sexual desire, their own mortality. “The world of four objects into which her diagnosis had marched her like a bored prison guard,” writes St Aubyn in describing Lucy’s hospitalization for a brain tumor. The usual comic relief - bluff, rich Americans; footloose Catholic friars - don’t seem to contribute very much in terms of alleviating suffering. And St Aubyn flirts, gently but decisively, with the idea that there might be some different way of viewing things. “As the world descended into catastrophe the psychedelic renaissance had arrived just in time to catch its fall,” he writes, but that’s like how The Economist might describe its LSD trip - he isn’t willing to really explore (or to let his characters explore) some alternative to scientific materialism, which, had he done so, would likely have forced him to drop the life-of-the-party shtick and to deal with the very interesting, very complicated issues he raises with actual emotional investment.
Nicely written, but maybe better book selection in future? Double Blind sounds like a dud. Leave The World Behind is on the old side. I think best not to waste time on books that you don't actually like. There's Kirkus/Publishers Weekly to sort out wheat and chaff!