Leave the World Behind

“Smoking tethered you to history itself! It was a patriotic act, or once had been, anyway, like owning slaves or killing the Cherokee.” 

This quote is a wry nod to America’s history of racist violence and a marker of Clay’s glib attitude toward the real impact of his smoking; he is willing to hint at subjugation and violence as a core part of American identity, but only in a way that undercuts it and makes him feel like he is thinking of it from a place of ironic distance.

“Amanda had a novel she could barely follow, with a tiresome central metaphor involving birds.” 

Rumaan Alam takes a moment here to undercut his own book, which features a central metaphor involving birds. This can be read as either a meta moment of self-consciousness or an admission that literature will have to carve out a new kind of meaning-making in the face of apocalyptic living.

“The [Starbucks] was the same as all locations of a chain tend to be, but wasn’t that comforting? The signature colors, those dependable brown napkins—always a stack in the car for blowing winter noses or mopping up spills—the green plastic straws, the heavyset devotees paying seven dollars for cream-topped milkshakes in cups the size of athletic trophies.” 

The early chapters of this book take pains to show Clay and Amanda’s desire to exist at a remove from capitalist/technological society while still indulging in it as a comfort and vice. Starbucks is the perfect encapsulation of that, as it has taken on a reputation of branded, ubiquitous existence in 21st-century America that someone from Brooklyn would view with disdain while still stopping in for a latte.

“He held up his hands in a gesture that was either conciliatory or said Don’t shoot. By his age, black men were adept at this gesture.” 

Race is a central conflict between the two couples, and many of their interactions contain the imagery and language of the Black Lives Matter movement. Amanda and Clay are the kind of people that might think themselves beyond racist ideology, but G. H. knows better than to assume, and he has much more experience navigating the White world than vice versa.

“‘They scared the shit out of me.’ Now that the fear had passed, Amanda could admit it. It was an insult. The temerity of these people—to scare her!”

The racist language in Amanda’s thinking of G. H. and Ruth as “these people” should not go unnoticed, as it presages further racist thoughts by Amanda as well as the microaggressions she commits. 

“She was right, in that she didn’t know the whole story, nor did Clay, nor did the people in the kitchen, nor did the junior editor who, seeing the news cross the wire, issued the alert to the millions of people who had the New York Times app installed on their phones. The wind was so fierce, but even if it hadn’t been, they likely would have been just too far from the flight path to hear the first planes dispatched to the coast, per protocol in that situation.”

This is the first moment in the book where the narration becomes more expansive, moving briefly to a scene outside of the house to show what the characters don’t know. Their petty interpersonal issues and speculation about what’s going on become tinged with dramatic irony in these moments.

“‘This is my house.’ Ruth was holding tight to the railing. She felt it important to underscore this fact.” 

Ruth does not like that she must use the living space designed for her elderly mother, nor does she like the way that she is in a subservient position in her own home, which for her is reminiscent of the way people have treated her because of her race and her age.

“Amanda couldn’t help sit up a little straighter. Perhaps there was an angle. Her children, not exceptional (still wonderful in her estimation!), could do with an advantage. She knew the tuition was a suggestion. Families like theirs relied on the largesse of the luckier people.”

Amanda’s social striving here is callous and a reminder of how limited her worldview can be. She is in denial about how much of an emergency they are facing, and she’s unwilling to consider how appropriate it might be to ask for a favor right now, especially given that her children have advantages that many young Black children do not.

“It was hard not to assume the role of genial sitcom neighbor. Television created the context, and black people had to play along. But this was his house. He was the protagonist of his story.” 

The idea of who the protagonist of the story is will resurface several times in the book, with the implication here that G. H. and Ruth have worked hard to achieve a life that shelters them from the racialized role G. H. tries to avoid in this moment.

“The feeling was withdrawal. On planes, she turned off airplane mode and started trying to check her email once you heard that ding that meant you were fewer than ten thousand feet aloft. The flight attendants were buckled in and couldn’t scold. She’d pull and pull and pull at the screen, waiting for the connection to be established, waiting to see what she had missed.” 

One of the book’s most incisive observations is the way that our phones have become a kind of security blanket and tether to the world around us. Without access to information, the characters in this book are left bereft and incapable.

“[Maya’s] distrust was not of her parents but of the world that they had made, and maybe she was right.” 

Ruth’s strained relationship with Maya will drive her antipathy toward Amanda and her children throughout the book, but she understands where Maya is coming from: It’s clear to Ruth that the world that her grandchildren will inherent will not be a pleasant one, and she can empathize with Maya’s suspicion of any impulses that seem to come from Ruth’s generation.

“The dark that had settled on Manhattan, that tangible thing, could be explained. But beyond the dark was everything else, and that was more vague, hard to hold on to as spider’s silk, there but not there, all around them.” 

Early in the book, a passage refers to satellites as a kind of Ariadne’s thread, so it’s telling here that spider’s silk again symbolizes something impossible to hold on to: The world beyond their immediate sight is slipping away from them, and though a blackout might be an explanation, it’s far from the whole picture. Without access to technology, the characters’ world has become a labyrinth.

“Did it matter if a storm had metastasized into something for which no noun yet existed? Did it matter if the electrical grid broke apart like something built of Lego? Did it matter if Lego would never biodegrade, would outlast Notre Dame, the pyramids at Giza, the pigment daubed on the walls at Lascaux? Did it matter if some nation claimed responsibility for the outage, did it matter that it was condemned as an act of war, did it matter if this was pretext for a retaliation long hoped for, did it matter that proving who had done what via wires and networks was actually impossible? Did it matter if an asthmatic woman named Deborah died after six hours trapped on an F train stalled beneath the Hudson River, and that the other people on the subway walked past her body and felt nothing in particular? Did it matter that machines meant for supporting life ceased doing that hard work after the failure of backup generators in Miami, in Atlanta, in Charlotte, in Annapolis? Did it matter if the morbidly obese grandson of the Eternal President actually did send a bomb, or did it matter simply that he could, if he wanted to?”

This is the first passage that really keys the reader in on the scope of what’s happened: This is a world-ending event, but the characters still suffer from their own interpersonal squabbles and immediate concerns. The repetition of “Did it matter?” here has multiple meanings. The issues brought up here ultimately don’t matter to the lives of the characters, and an explanation for why the events are happening does not provide any solution or appropriate course of action.

“Fools believe rebellion is possible. Capital determines everything. You can either calibrate yourself to that or think you’ve rejected it. But the latter, Stephen Johnson said, was a delusion. You were either going to get rich or not. You only had to choose.” 

This passage of G. H. relaying his mentor’s advice is woefully out of date as he says it; the world of capitalism will not matter in a day or two. It also perpetuates an illusion that G. H. himself must believe in to rationalize his own success: that he earned everything he did merely because of being smart and making a correct choice in life. His sense of control is a luxury that the apocalypse will take from him by the end of the novel.

“Amanda was furious […] She blamed it on these people. They’d knocked on the door and ruined everything.” 

Amanda’s panic is metastasizing into something ugly here: She is treating Ruth and G. H. as though they are to blame for the events of the world, much in the same way Black people often face blame for turning the conversation toward race or being too negative about America’s legacy.

“You know, you look a little like Denzel Washington.” 

This is a textbook example of microaggression, as Amanda makes what she views as a harmless comparison and then goes on to suggest a relation between G. H. and Denzel. (As an added layer of metatextual irony here, Denzel Washington has signed on to play G. H. in a television adaptation of this book)

“‘You can put your clothes in too. I just—while the power is still on.’ It was too intimate, but Ruth had foresight. It would save them the trek to the Laundromat when they got home. Amanda did not know that the Laundromat was closed. She did not know that the Chinese man who ran it was inside the elevator […] in Brooklyn Heights, and he’d been there for hours, and he’d die there, though that was many hours in the future yet. ‘That’s smart. Thank you.’” 

Here, Ruth is extending an olive branch that is a marker that these two families are moving past the concerns they had been facing. Issues of race and class are dissolving among the two of them as the power dynamic between them begins to build on trust and belonging, which is fitting, as the power dynamics that they have known all their lives are breaking down all around them without their knowledge.

“‘It’s not the end of the world,’ G. H. said, ‘It’s a market event.’” 

G. H. has a hubristic view of what’s going on thanks to a long career of seeing the markets respond to disastrous events. He is anticipating people getting rich off what’s happening and viewing it with curiosity as much as dread. 

“‘Did you fill the bathtub?’ Amanda was doing what she was able to. ‘It’s an emergency! We’ll need water!’” 

Without access to the internet, Amanda must rely on whatever knowledge she has about acting in an emergency, so she returns repeatedly to the only thing she is sure of: If the power goes out, so do water pumps, so having bathtubs full of water is important.

“Ruth didn’t want to be this person. The help-meet; the supporting player. Her daughter was also lost to her. Who would help her find her grandsons? Who would hold her up?”

Ruth resents the subservient position she’s placed in throughout the novel. Here, there’s an additional element: She has no support system of her own but others still expect her to be the grandmotherly figure to the people in this house.

“She wanted to know that her child and her grandchildren were safe, but of course, Ruth would never know that. You never know that. You demanded answers, but the universe refused. Comfort and safety were just an illusion. Money meant nothing. All that meant anything was this—people, in the same place, together. This was what was left to them.” 

One of the things that sets this novel apart from other apocalyptic literature is its focus on the interpersonal scale. One theme of the book is clear here: Beyond race and class and capitalism, what we have is each other.

“G. H. could see that he’d miscalculated. He understood the man’s posture. He should have known that what he’d always believed of people was true; that the social order had allowed most of them to believe themselves not social animals.” 

Danny’s response to G. H. confirms his suspicion that he was always an outsider in this community, for both racist and social reasons. More than that, it confirms his belief that many people would use a situation like this one to assert their libertarian right to tribalism.

“Rose knew what the noise was, but no one had asked her. It was the sound of fact. It was the change they’d pretended not to know was coming. It was the end of one kind of life, but it was also the beginning of another kind of life. Rose kept walking.” 

Rose is something of an idealist, but in some ways she has a better grip on the situation than any of the adults. She knows that they won’t be going back to the world they knew before, and is choosing instead to start planning for a different kind of future.