Leave the World Behind: A Read with Jenna Pick

This book seems to garner strong opinions in the reviews, and after reading it, I can see why. The opening is very simple: a family rents an isolated house out on Long Island for a vacation. Shortly after their arrival, the owners of the house show up with the news that something has happened, but it is not clear what that something was, and there is not an easy way to find out since all modern forms of communication have are not working. Now at this point, there are many directions this story could go in. I cannot count how many horror/thrillers I have seen start out with a similar premise. But the author takes the story in a different direction, and I believe this is the source of many diverging opinions. Rather than take the story in the familiar directions that we have seen similar tales go, the author chooses to focus on the most mundane things of the family's visit. The first part of their vacation and the people involved's inner thoughts. In fact, the story has a very Closter phobic feel to it where the characters seem just as trapped in their own thoughts and emotions as they do by the events unfolding around them. The anxiety of interacting with strangers on an intimate level comes off as just as bad as whatever it is that is going on in the outside world, and I believe that is what the title implies. The disjointed feel to the narrative as it jumps from person to person adds to the feeling of confusion and disruption that is contrasted with what is conveyed in the characters' conversations. ( Something we have all done saying one thing while thinking another.) As events unfold very slowly ( most of the book takes place within a 48-hour time span), I could not help but wonder how I would behave in such a scary and disorienting situation and how my behavior would change if there were strangers there to witness it. This is played out as the characters swing between overconfident speculation, hedonistic denial, and confused dread as events unfold. Simultaneously, the reader is provided with information that highlights the situation's seriousness without really explaining what the situation is. This is both these books' greatest strength and weakness. Like most people, I am used to having stories be wrapped up in a clear conclusion at the end, where all is revealed, and the protagonists have a clear path forward to the future. But too often, this type of ending seems lazy and simplistic. This book avoids doing this with its ending and the style in which it is written. While looking for some clear answers and a reassuring conclusion, I do not believe that was the author's goal. This book is more a study of human emotions and interactions. How we perceive others and how they perceive themselves and how we present ourselves to the world and look at from that perspective accomplishes its goal. If you are looking for a neat survival story that hits all of the familiar marks, you will be sorely disappointed. If you are looking for a story about human interactions and the contrast of how we present ourselves to the world as opposed to our inner thoughts, you will like this book. I liked this book.

For a book about the potential end of the world, this one was kind of boring if I'm being honest. I'm sure there's some existential something or other I'm supposed to get out of it, but I do not see why Julia Roberts is helming the Netflix version coming out later this year.Amanda, Clay and their two kids rent a beautiful house in Upstate New York for the week. Their second night there, an elderly black couple show up and say they're the homeowners. That NYC is in a complete blackout and they fled the city and were hoping they could stay in their own in law suite. While Amanda and Clay are suspicious, they're not really sure how to say no.Then strange things start happening, the tvs and phones don't work, a flock of flamingos bathes in the pool. A sonic boom occurs. Their son gets sick. And then it ends.I guess this is about human nature and fear of the unknown but it was written in such flowery language that I found I really didn't care about the kale that was so green it was almost black.....

I loved this book and I can't stop thinking about it. I do not think it was a good choice for Jenna's book club on the Today show, as evidenced by the multiple angry Karens in this review section.The mundane and often hateful inner thoughts of the upper-middle class Brooklyn couple were painful to read, but that's the whole point--they are not likeable people, but just as in the end of the world we will likely be forced to ally with people who annoy us, so we are forced to ally with Clay and Amanda. Alam's characterization of them felt especially damning to me since right down to their age and car, they are essentially my husband and me. But good writing makes you uncomfortable.The lists, words, items and objects piled on top of each other--this felt suffocating, and that's how it was meant to felt. To be able to write a story so spare that still can induce claustrophobia is a feat, and I'm jealous and thrilled that Alam did it. The same thing applies to his narration of the couple's sex life, which feels excessive. That's the idea. It is excessive, frightening, too much. It makes us think about why it affects us the way it does, the lack of boundaries, the "center-of-the-universe" quality that we hate in this white Brooklyn couple and their painfully average kids, and for a lot of readers (see Jenna's book club) that directs us back at ourselves. Sorry, not sorry etc.The idea that the world is ending around us and we at first don't notice it, then don't believe it, then don't know how to stop it, and finally realizing you can't stop it is chilling. The added realization that Clay and Amanda lead us to is that this is ever more painful--as a lot of us will discover--when we were once the center of the world. Like them, we'll be looking into the maw of our carefully constructed identities.The writing was beautiful, even where it felt overwhelming. Even when it revealed something ugly. Sometimes the language felt like it was covering the story, like the ground cover in a forest, but that worked for me because it echoed in the narration--third person omniscient, which created a kind of noise out of multiple overlapping consciousnesses that I had to sift through in order to find out that, yes, the world was ending, that horrible noise was a sonic boom, and where the animals were coming from. It's there, it's just not as obvious as, say, a Stephen King novel might be. If you like things over-explained, this is not the book for you.I liked the Washingtons as characters and I thought they worked, especially watching as they realized their wealth was not protecting them from, first, Clay and Amanda and, then, from the apocalypse. They're self reflective, solid, and gracious--the embodiment of their home. Their consciousness is a relief from Amanda's endless self-obsession when it begins to appear--and somehow I felt frustrated on Ruth and GH's behalf that I couldn't hear more from them."Leave the World Behind" echoes "To the Lighthouse" in both form and story, where TTL conceives of the end of the world as World War One--at the time, that WAS the end of the world--LTWB conceives of the end of the world as essentially the logical conclusion of the Trump presidency. Which could also explain all the angry Karens.TLDR; this book is excellent, haunting, chilling, and not for everyone.

Hat mir gut gefallen. Schreibstil. Oft interessante und originelle Aussagen. Es geht über die Zerbrechlichkeit von Menschen. Wir sind angewiesen und merken es nicht. Sehr menschlich die Menschen hier.

'Leave the World Behind' is a disturbing apocalypse novel set in New York state, USA. The exact date isn't specified but the technology etc. seems to be similar to now (early 2020s). A middle class family is enjoying a long weekend away from the city at a remote house where you can 'leave the world behind'. Their holiday is spoiled when the home's owners, an older couple, arrive one evening, having fled New York after a 'blackout'. Internet and TV no longer work, and further disturbing signs follow. No one knows exactly what is going on, but it becomes increasingly clear that this may be the end of the world - at least as we know it. This difficult situation is compounded by the two sets of strangers uneasily sharing a home.It's a densely written - I would go as far as saying overwritten - book which takes a long time to get going. I partly understand that - the need to provide a contrast between the carefree, decadent lifestyle of the characters and what they will likely face in the future - but I did start to get impatient. Even once the older couple arrive it still takes a while before the sense of threat builds sufficiently for things to get exciting.The viewpoint jumps around between characters within the same scene, a technique that never works well in my opinion, and here disrupts the opportunities for genuine mystery. The novel also reveals more about what is going on in the wider world than the characters themselves are aware of - I'm not sure if that is a negative or a positive for the storytelling. It separates the reader from the characters by giving us superior knowledge. Whether that enhances or undermines the overall effect is hard to say without reading an equivalent where it wasn't done. The nature of the disaster(s) going on in the wider world seem a bit nebulous and possibly too much at once. A lot is still unexplained by the end.It certainly is unsettling, by taking very ordinary characters and portraying how an apocalypse might play out in real time. It's a bit too close to what might happen to a reader to be comfortable. Whether we really want to confront what it would feel like minute by minute to be caught up in the end of the world is another matter. Personally it felt a bit too close to the bone, and coupled with the fact I didn't particularly like the characters and felt some elements didn't ring true, my overall impression wasn't as good as I'd hoped.

Rumaan Alam's Leave The World Behind isn't so much a dystopian novel as a novel that hints of a dystopian world to come. It begins with a New York family - husband, wife, boy and girl - driving to a remote house they're renting for their summer holiday on Long Island. They arrive, they settle in, they swim, and apart from the terrible phone reception and the lack of broadband, it's all good. But then the owners of the house, a polite, dignified older couple, arrive. New York has suffered a city-wide power cut, so they've come to stay.At first, Amanda and Clay are suspicious, and despite their supposed liberal values, it's the fact that the owners are black that unseats them (the house, Amanda thinks, 'doesn't seem like the sort of house where black people lived', although she admits to herself that even she doesn't really know what she means by that) but they don't have much option but to let them in - not least because Amanda and Clay don't want to appear racist by turning away a black couple they might have turned away if they'd been white. It's exactly, Amanda thinks ruefully, the sort of thing 'a canny black criminal would take advantage of'.Once Ruth and George 'GH' Washington have settled themselves in, it becomes apparent that along with the WiFi, the TV signal has gone too. And when there's briefly a phone signal, the only news alerts are scrambled gibberish. When Clay attempts to drive to the nearest town to find out more, he gets mysteriously lost and encounters a woman - a uniformed domestic worker - distraught and sobbing by the road. But she can't express herself in English and Clay is too awkward to attempt even what little Spanish he knows.There's something profoundly unsettling about this book, which reads like a literary hybrid of Paul Tremblay's The Cabin In The Woods, Cormac McCarthy's The Road and a Jordan Peele film. It's a book in which the characters know nothing and the narrator knows everything, but the most chilling part is that the narrator keeps most of what they know to themselves. Occasionally, as the three generations of affluent, middle-class New Yorkers make polite conversation around the pool, admire the granite worktops and sip cocktails in the hot tub, the narrator will casually tell us of something that's happening elsewhere - the slow deaths of those who are stranded in permanently halted subway trains or elevators, for example. The manipulative omniscience of the narrator makes the dithering indecision and denial of the two families, nibbling on artisan brie while Rome burns, all the more stressful for the reader. We know more than the characters - but only slightly, and which means what we do we know is simply enough to make us even more uneasy than they are.This feeling is somehow heightened by Alam's decision to tell the story from the point of view of all the characters - Amanda, Clay, Ruth, GH, and the two teenagers, Archie and Rose - in turn. That constant switching of a close third person narrative is something we don't see often in fiction, and there's something indefinably disorientating about it. It works perfectly for this novel.Alam also uses the natural world to a similarly unnerving effect. Wildlife appears in intimidatingly large numbers, or in entirely the wrong environment. When Rose suddenly realises she's being watched by hundreds of silent deer, she's both captivated and scared. Flamingos, so beautiful in their proper environment, become ominously out-of-place and confusing in the woods of Long Island.Part satire, part apocalyptic warning, Leave The World Behind is still occupying an awful lot of my thoughts several days after I finished it. However, it asks a lot of questions of us and gives us very few answers so if neat plot resolution is your thing, it's a book that might not be for you. As the atmosphere becomes increasingly oppressive and doom-laden as the book draws to its ambiguous conclusion, there's a strong sense that what's unfolding is not much an end as a beginning. The beginning of what, however, is worryingly unclear.

I very nearly stopped reading this after the first few chapters. We follow a New York family - mum, dad and two teenage children - as they travel to their isolated holiday AirBnB in a rural part of upper state New York. Every conversation, everything they buy, everything they eat along the way and when they arrive is painstakingly described. I suppose this helps to set the scene - these people are well-off white liberal city folk who are constantly on their phones or laptops and don't stop to think too deeply about anything (especially why the georgeous country landscape they are driving through seems so empty of people when there are lovely houses and cottages dotted everywhere).But, just as I was at the point of getting throughly sick of these shallow, self-centred people, there's a sudden switch. Late at night, two people - a black couple - appear at their door, claiming to be the owners of the house and talking about a blackout in New York and how they can't get to their home there. We then get a thankfully different PoV - that of the couple - and the story suddenly gets interesting. So much so that I sayed up late to finish it in one sitting!What the author excels in is telling us about the characters' thoughts, feelings and motives through their gestures and behaviour. The children are very well-written as well, with their self-absorption and separation from their parents; And the countryside that surrounds and suffocates becomes almost a character in itself - alien and threatening.I won't say anything about the plot, even though the author sprinkles enough brief asides throughout the last half of the story so that the ending comes as no suprise. Personally, I would have preferred the scale and seriousness of the disaster to be kept ambigous, and for it to be a tale of ordinary people trapped without any contact with the outside world that they've always taken for granted.But it was still a good read, and very well told.Finally, a note to the author - flamingoes are naturally white. They're only pink because they eat algae and shrimps that are high in carotene and its nothing to do with their genetics.

So it came in good condition and I liked the plot but I hate the ending. Just my opinion you may think different! I think it’s worth reading though x