Rumaan Alam’s latest novel, Leave the World Behind, is difficult to categorize. Is it a thriller? Literary fiction? Sci-fi? Post-apocalyptic? It has attributes of each genre without fitting solely into any of them. Leave the World Behind follows Amanda and Clay, a well-off white New York couple with two teenage children, Archie and Rose, as they travel to a remote house in the Hamptons for a family vacation. Amanda and Clay just want to have a relaxing end-of-summer trip with their children, but their vacation takes a strange turn when an elderly black couple shows up on their doorstep in the middle of the night. Ruth and G.H. are the owners of the house and they have unexpectedly returned after blackouts ravage New York City. Immediately upon their arrival, Amanda’s unconscious racial biases go into overdrive. Are Ruth and G.H. really the owners of the house? Can she and Clay trust what they are saying? Is this a trap? Leave the World Behind promises to address racial tensions in modern-day America against the backdrop of a mysterious apocalyptic event. While the book’s social commentary is a success, the slow-paced plot and lack of resolution is head-scratching, and Leave the World Behind never reaches its full potential. 

        It is clear from the novel’s first pages that Amanda and Clay are undoubtedly unlikeable characters. When Amanda’s character is introduced, she is speaking on the phone to her Korean account director and thinking about the woman’s “incongruous” accent, something she silently acknowledges to herself as “so racist she could never admit it to anyone.” Clay is a professor who wants to be a book reviewer, but he does not want to do the work the job requires and would rather masturbate on a family vacation than write anything. The reader is treated to a detailed description of how Clay’s “penis jerked itself towards the sun, a yoga salutation” and a page-long sequence about what Amanda bought at the grocery store, from “thick-cut bacon and a two-pound bag of flour and twelve-dollar maple syrup in a faceted glass bottle like a tacky perfume” to “some heirloom tomatoes wrapped in crinkling cellophane, marbled green and shocking orange.” Amanda and Clay feel realistic in their horribleness, and they are meant to be characters the reader does not want to spend time with. The problem is that Leave the World Behind is only 240-pages and Alam spends too much time describing everything Amanda and Clay do, like this will provide valuable insight long after their characters are already established. He fills up pages with metaphors like “they huddled and inspected like Caravaggio's Thomas and friends” and excessive details before even approaching the aforementioned conflict. These scenes of long grocery lists and a man pleasuring himself slow the novel’s pacing down to an almost unbearable extent and take up precious page time in an already short novel. 

        The real plot begins with the arrival of Ruth and G.H. Washington to the house. They are an elderly Black couple who enjoy going to museums and classical music concerts, something Amanda has a hard time imagining due to her preconceived notions about Black people. As the two couples coexist while waiting for the power to return, the tension simmers. Ruth worries about the fate of her married daughter living upstate. G.H. plays nice with Amanda and Clay when he would rather they not be in his house. Clay tells Amanda she is acting unreasonably while Amanda hides her distrust behind forced social niceties. It seems like this tension will culminate in a confrontation between the couples, but no such event occurs. The couples ask each other questions as they sit around awkwardly in the hot tub, G.H. mixes drinks, and Amanda teaches Ruth how to make chocolate and Brie sandwiches. Alam’s writing gives an atmosphere of claustrophobia, but the plot has little action and none of the promised thrills. 

        The reason why the East Coast has fallen into darkness is also never resolved. The description on the book’s dust jacket makes it seem like this will be an important plot point, but Alam spends more time describing Archie’s “long limbs and acute angles, barely convex chest sprouting brown twists at the pink nipples” and Rose’s body “curvy and jiggling,  downy with baby hair, her polka-dot one-piece straining just so at the legs, pudendum in relief” than the cause of the blackout. There is not enough time spent developing the events of the story and the entire book is a slow burn of drama that flames out just as it reaches its apex. The characters continually say they are waiting “until [they] know something,” the husbands assuring their wives that all will be settled soon, but that moment of clarity never comes. The events of the novel are too vague to be frightening, and the characters too shallow to garner emotional investment.

        Ultimately, while Leave the World Behind had promise and good social commentary, the entertainment value was lacking. Perhaps one of the reasons why the book was so disappointing is that publisher Ecco chose to advertise Leave the World Behind as a thriller when the book does not hit any of the thriller plot beats or linger in the mystery whatsoever. While Alam could have encouraged his readers to leave the world behind and immerse themselves in a creepy, suspenseful story about racial tensions and the end of the world, Leave the World Behind ends confusingly and suddenly as if mid-thought. It seems like there was an interesting story here, but it was not happening on the page.