Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam review – an X-ray of America

An unexpected knock at the door. It’s the narrative spark of children’s jokes, fairytales and campfire ghost stories, of drawing-room dramas and horror film bloodbaths. When a midnight knock breaks the quiet of Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, any one of these plot creatures might be waiting on the doorstep. Alam’s trope-heavy third novel has the makings of a farce, and the portents of a slaughter.

It is a dark and stormy night. In a field surrounded by woods stands a lone brick house – “the very material the smartest piggy chose because it would keep him safest” – a luxurious Long Island vacation rental that is out of reach of mobile phone service, and out of earshot of the neighbours. The walls are white, the picket fence is white, and inside the house is a white middle-class family of holidaymakers “pantomiming ownership”. The children – Archie and Rose – are sun-kissed and sleeping; their Brooklynite parents – Amanda and Clay – are basking in a post-coital glow. “They’d made a nice life for themselves, hadn’t they?”

Begging entry are George (GH) and Ruth Washington, a black couple in their 60s who claim to own the place. GH stands at the door with his hands aloft, “a gesture that was either conciliatory or said Don’t shoot”. There’s been a city-wide blackout, they explain – a sudden and unexplained chaos – so they’ve driven out from Manhattan to their rural bolthole to seek refuge. The vacationers are sceptical. “This didn’t seem to her like the sort of house where black people lived,” Amanda thinks to herself. “But what did she mean by that?”

It’s a delicious conceit, a theatrically contained collision of power and prejudice. There’s such scope for viciousness, and for virtue, too, even if it is only signalled (“morality was vanity, in the end”). And while there’s no ignoring the high-concept contrivance of the novel’s doorstep confrontation, there’s a sharp pleasure in watching Alam pull the expository strings.

As in Alam’s previous fiction, the languid opening act of Leave the World Behind is a high-res cultural X-ray – liberal America’s white bones a-glowing. There’s indolent Clay, a tenured professor who “wanted to be asked to write for the New York Times Book Review but didn’t want to actually write anything”; and striving Amanda, sunbathing on her ethically sourced beach blanket (“She had to pretend her way to being a good person”). Only Alam could turn the contents of the family’s supermarket trolley into a cultural diagnosis.

Yet once he has manoeuvred his cast into position, Alam seems unsure what to do with – or to – them. The two families wake the morning after the New York blackout and vacillate. Should someone venture out and investigate? Should Amanda and Clay pack up their things and leave? Should someone fetch snacks? When a soul-rending, glass-cracking noise fills the sky, any pretence that life is normal is obliterated. “You didn’t hear such a noise: you experienced it, endured it, survived it, witnessed it.” But the noise only entrenches the group’s indecision. George keeps the booze flowing; Rose bakes a packet cake; Amanda marvels at the beauty of the Vermont stone countertops. All of them are trapped in a kind of decadent, feckless daze, like smoke-drunk bees – a learned helplessness after decades of institutional rot. “It was like some tacit agreement,” Alam writes, “everyone had ceded to things just falling apart.”

And perhaps this is the resounding point of the book: when faced with the prospect of world-altering calamity – its moral exigencies and necessary sacrifices – we’re unlikely to do much at all except break out the hummus. It’s less an accusation than a grotesquely banal human truth.

Leave the World Behind is the kind of novel that begs comparisons: Jordan Peele films, Black Mirror episodes, and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite; John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation and the short fiction of John Cheever and Ray Bradbury. And – of course – any number of titles from contemporary literature’s ever-growing catalogue of dystopias (Helen Phillips’s The Need comes to mind). The novel itself even suggests a contender, a class-flipped take on that Sidney Poitier classic, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

Related: Rumaan Alam: ‘What we are experiencing now is part of a bigger moment’

With such pop-cultural literacy, it’s no wonder Leave the World Behind has already been optioned by Netflix. But Alam’s novel invites this comparative shorthand because it struggles to develop a personality of its own. George and Ruth, for instance, are never granted the interiority that animates (and indicts) Amanda and Clay; they become genial placeholders. And while we catch omniscient snatches of the coming death and ruin, Alam’s catastrophe is conveniently vague – a catalyst for more intimate terrors. It’s one of those geopolitical eruptions so beloved of dystopian fiction, a world-ending confrontation that somehow takes the world by surprise.

As the book’s caustic ambitions falter, what remains is something more raw-hearted and earnest, a novel about the agonies of parenting. How can you love one another, once you realise you cannot save one another? Alam asks. How can you look your child in the eye when you realise their world will be worse than yours? That’s no dystopic hypothetical: it’s the sound of the future pounding at the door.

• Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam is published by Bloomsbury (RRP £12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.