Leave the World Behind

The last two weeks, my younger son has been particularly difficult to get to sleep. We moved him out of our room, out of his crib. It has been disruptive. I have taken to lying in between the two twin beds in my kids’ room sort of checking Twitter and sort of just feeling the bones in my hips slide into the carpet. The pandemic has been tiring, and a newly sleepless toddler makes it even more tiring still. He tosses and turns, leans over the side of the bed, asks me for “Mommy’s hand,” and by the time he finally drifts off to sleep, it’s about ten thirty, and I race downstairs to finish up the dregs of my cleaning. My husband has done the dishes, I have to do the last load of laundry, and then I can pour myself a tiny bowl of cheerios and a big glass of water and get ready for bed. The “free time” I was cultivating for writing, tv-watching, or whatever has been reduced from two or three hours to about forty minutes. This will pass.

The last two nights, I have crawled into bed around midnight and opened my book, thinking I’ll just read a little bit and then go to sleep. But the book I started on Wednesday is Rumaan Alam’s new novel, Leave the World Behind, and I am gripped beyond reason. I’m about forty pages from the end after two big bursts of late night reading and I am shocked by how terrified this book has made me. I mean, we are living through an actual pandemic and, perhaps, through the actual end of democracy — or whatever approaches it — in the US. Alam’s book pulls together the kinds of details I associate with domestic fiction — what kinds of food a character is buying, how much it costs, what kinds of closures her pants have — and the dystopian frame of speculative fiction. To my eye, the details are part of the structure of terror: we can’t leave off the habits of our lives when living through a catastrophe, in part because the habits have become the scaffold that unifies our conscious lives. We check our phones. We pour a drink. We watch something dumb on tv. In Alam’s book, one of the key signals that something is wrong comes when the phones and television stop working: without the comforting glow of the NYT home page, what can we really know about the world? I haven’t finished the book yet, but it’s gripping and awful. Alam is a tight, precise prose stylist, which makes the terror of the pacing more extreme. I kept reading a few more pages in the hopes that my anxiety would abate a bit (will the husband come back? will the children be ok? why are the deer doing that?) and, no, the book just never lets up. Wish me luck tonight from midnight to one, when I try to finish this novel and not scare myself into oblivion!