"You told yourself you'd be attuned to a holocaust, unfolding a world away, but you weren't. It was immaterial, thanks to distance. People weren't that connected to one another. Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to the movies or paying your taxes or fucking your wife or worrying about the mortgage."
"Leave the World Behind" starts slow, peppered with unnecessary words and off-putting sexual references, but as the pacing ramps up, that jarring beginning feels intentional by Rumaan Alam.
" ... His wife felt it important, not to do the moral thing, necessarily, but to be the kind of person who would. Morality was vanity, in the end."
"Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos, there was only a collective faith in order."
This book seamlessly takes on a frantic, sinister tone, bolstered by a well-woven racial component and fly-on-the-wall sentiments. The author uses a series of clues out of context to give hints as to the overriding apocalyptic feel to the plot, but doles them out sparingly to ratchet up the foreboding, eerie feel.
In addition to offering a master class in how to build tension through ominous undertones, Alam excels at taking what some only think and expressing it directly via his characters.
"Smoking tethered you to history itself! It was a patriotic act, or once had been, anyway, like owning slaves or killing the Cherokee."
"'Let's say something happens in New York City. Do you think this president will do the right thing about it?' This kind of thing used to sound like paranoia, but now it was just pragmatism."
The indirect references to what has altered life as we know it evoke Stephen King, in particular offering echoes of "Under the Dome."
The literary equivalent of a bottle episode, "Leave the World Behind" is staggeringly immersive, hammering away with choppy, weighty sentences, leaving the reader not wanting it to end -- not wanting to leave the story behind.
"If they didn't know how it would end -- with night, with more terrible noise from the top of Olympus, with bombs, with disease, with blood, with happiness, with deer or something else watching them from the darkened woods -- well, wasn't that true of every day?"
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