70 newyork| september14–27, 2020
Delusionsof WhitenessInRumaa m’s new thriller, a white
familystay t a HamptonsAirbnb
is startled theBlackowners
knockonthedoor.ByLilaShapiroPhotographbyJustinFrenchTheCULTUREPAGESA
littlemorethantwoyears ago, the novelist and critic
RumaanAlamlandeda jobas the editor of special proj-
ects atTheNewYorkTimesBook Review. It was a dream
job—ofcourseit was—andhe pictured himself working
atthat hallowedinstitutionfor the rest of his career. Buta fewmonthsintohistenure,hebeganto feel he was failing. Was he
justnotgoodenoughtomake it work?A troubling thought crept into
hismind,onethathaddoggedhimthroughout his years working at
prestigiousNewYorkmediainstitutions:What if the Times had hired
himnotbecauseit valuedhismindbutbecause it wanted to prove it
cared about diversity? He was so disturbed by this possibility that he
quit the job before the year was out.
This thought had haunted his life as a novelist as well. For as long ashe had been a writer, Alam imagined that certain people, including
editors and publishers, expected him to write about people he out-
wardly resembled. They didn’t say it outright, but he sometimes felt
their faces or tones betrayed that they found him interesting less
because of anything he said or wrote than because of where his parents
happened to be from. This perception had partly shaped his first two
novels, which he’d written from the perspectives of wealthy white
women, a choice that felt to him like a quiet act of rebellion. The winter
he left the Times, he secluded himself from his family in Brooklyn hotel
rooms and poured his existential dread into his writing.
The resulting book, Leave the World
Behind, is poised to be one of the biggest
titles of the fall. Netflix has already snapped
it up after a heated bidding war, with Sam
Esmail directing and Julia Roberts and
Denzel Washington set to star. An unset-
tling and seductive literary thriller, it
begins with an upper-middle-class white
family vacationing at a luxurious Airbnb in
the Hamptons. In the middle of the night, a
wealthy Black couple show up, declare that
they are the homeowners, and bring news
of a mysterious apocalyptic event. When
they ask to be let in, the uncomfortable
prejudices lurking beneath the guests’ nice
white liberal façade rise to the surface. “This
didn’t seem to her like the sort of house
where black people lived,” Alam writes of
Amanda, the white woman; immediately
after, she wonders what she meant by that.
As in his earlier books, Alam displays a
gift for writing about wealthy white people,
capturing white women in particular with
cutting precision. “My work is autobio-
graphical,” he told me the other day over
vodkas-on-ice in his Brooklyn backyard.
“But no one can see it.”the details of Alam’s life, both large
and small, are hidden throughout his
novels. Like the protagonist of his second
book, That Kind of Mother, he grew up in
an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C.,
“which is like growing up nowhere,” he says.
His parents moved there from Bangladesh
in the ’70s in pursuit of higher education
and a stable life. His mother became a
doctor, his father an architect, and together
they built an upper-middle-class life for
their children. Alam says he had no sense
that he was different from his classmates at
school, who were nearly all white. “My par-
ents really valued assimilation,” Alam tells
me. “They were leaving a political system
that had failed, and there was no desire on
the part of either of my parents to look back
with any rose-colored perspective. We were
there to be American. They were extremely
clear about that.” The second of four chil-
dren, Alam recalls a childhood devoid of
any remnants of his heritage. They went to
the country club, ate tuna casserole and Kix
cereal, didn’t go to a mosque, andhad few
South Asian friends. “I was raisedlike any
other white kid in any other nice house in
any other fancy American suburb,” he says.
An obsessive reader, he exhausted the
children’s branch of the local library when
he was 9 or 10 and moved on to adult
material—Agatha Christie, Robert Ludlum,
and Tom Clancy. He already knew he
wanted to be a writer. His formative years
were spent trying to emulate works by
white authors because that was what heleave the world behind is out on October 6.