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PHOTOGRAPH: LENA THE PLUG/YOUTUBE (LENA)
ematic form. Some 18 months later, several
producers and directors courted Alam. He
felt that Esmail, known for his work direct-
ing stylish TV thrillers, understood its
themes best.
According to Dan Chaon, a professor of
Alam’s at Oberlin, he had always been good
at “revealing people in all their laughable
delusions.” But Leave the World Behind
goes further than his previous novels, “tak-
ing apart the privilege of believing nothing
bad could ever happen to you,” Chaon adds.
The novel allows the reader only a few
glimpses into whatever calamity has
befallen the characters—a mysterious
blackout in New York City, sonic booms
powerful enough to make your teeth fall
out. Clay and Amanda, the Brooklyn couple
at the center of the story, soothe themselves
by indulging in a fantasy of being richer
than they are. As Esmail was reading, he
immediately pictured Roberts, with whom
he’d worked on the series Homecoming.
“With Amanda, we get to dissect white
entitlement, and I thought, What a fasci-
nating challenge for America’s sweetheart to
examine that privilege.” After Roberts came
onboard, Esmail asked her to reach out to
Washington about the role of G.H., the
homeowner, an allusion to a racist thought
Amanda blurts out in the novel: “You know,
you look a little like Denzel Washington.”
Like many white people who live in
Brooklyn, Clay and Amanda imagine them-
selves to be more enlightened than they are.
At the grocery store, Amanda buys coffee
filters made from recycled paper (and doz-
ens of other items Alam describes with
anthropological precision), but she struggles
to come to terms with the fact that a Black
family owns a house she and her husband
can’t afford. “What if this was some con?
Perfect strangers worming their way into
the house, into their lives.” Another sort of
thriller might have played up the ambiguity
for suspense, but Alam quickly lets the
reader know that G.H. and his wife, Ruth,
are who they say they are. What interests
him is the delusion at the heart of whiteness,
the belief that people of color don’t belong in
your space, even when you’re the interloper.
In Alam’s backyard, night had fallen, and
most of the bottle of vodka was gone. As we
drained the last of our drinks, he contem-
plated the threads of autobiography woven
th rough his books. It may not look like it, but,
in a way, his latest is his immigrant novel:
both a product of the way he was raised to
belong and his realization that he never really
would. “Assimilation is not done in a way that
is self-aware. You’re not like, Oh, I’m a brown
person learning how to enact whiteness,” he
says. “I write about the living embodiment of
a certain kind of blindness.” ■
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