CANR
WORK TITLE: Entitlement
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://rumaanalam.com/
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CA 400
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Son of an architect and a doctor; married; children: two.
EDUCATION:Attended Oberlin College.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Marketer and writer. Worked in advertising as a copywriter and creative director; worked as an assistant at Lucky magazine.
AWARDS:National Book Award finalist, 2020, for Leave the World Behind.
WRITINGS
Contributes stories to periodicals, including StoryQuarterly, Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, Crazyhorse, and Meridian. Writes about design and other subjects for periodicals, including Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, New York Times, New York magazine, and for websites, including Los Angeles Review of Books, Rumpus, and Architectural Digest Online.
Leave the World Behind was adapted as a 2023 feature film directed by Sam Esmail and starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, and Ethan Hawke.
SIDELIGHTS
Rumaan Alam is a writer and novelist whose parents immigrated to the United States from Bangladesh in the 1970s. Alam grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. His debut novel, Rich and Pretty, focuses on Lauren and Sarah, friends from childhood. Although quite different from each other, the two remain friends as Alam follows them into their thirties and their lives diverge.
Alam chose to write about two women and their friendship because he “felt a desire to avoid the pressure to deliver something that adhered to some larger critical notion of what it is that writers of Indian descent ought to write about in this country,” as he told Linda Wertheimer in an interview for NPR. Alam went on to note, however, that because he is gay, he frequently socialized with girls in high school. This association with women continued at the liberal arts college he attended and later in life in his work for a fashion magazine and then in advertising, where many of his colleagues were also women. “So in some ways, this is writing what I know,” Alam told Wertheimer.
Alam’s decision as a man to write a novel rich with dialogue between two women was noted by several reviewers. “ Rich and Pretty mines terrain over which male novelists generally tread lightly,” wrote Rumpus Web site contributor Jason Arthur, who added: “Alam fully commits, carefully navigating such third-rail subjects as body image and female libido as he sees a female friendship from its vibrant, vital inception through to a complacent early middle age.”
The novel’s title, Rich and Pretty, refers to the story’s protagonists, Sarah and Lauren, respectively. Sarah comes from a wealthy family. Her father is a notorious hawkish statesman and former adviser to the president, and her mother is a former Venezuelan folk singer who now lives life as a socialite. Meanwhile, Lauren’s mother worked as a manager of a doctor’s office but elected to go deep into debt so that her daughter could attend an elite prep school. “At its best, this friendship allows Sarah and Lauren to transcend their present situations, to understand their lives as including but ultimately not being defined by the current moment,” wrote Rumpus contributor Arthur. He added, “At its worst, the friendship blinds both to the inequality that shapes their lives, a blinding that benefits Sarah more than it does Lauren.”
The story begins in the shadow of Sarah’s upcoming wedding to her boring fiancé, a doctor. She has asked her old friend Lauren to be her maid of honor and to help her plan the wedding, which Sarah would like to keep low-key despite her parents’ wishes for a grand affair. While Sarah is caught up in preparing for the wedding, Lauren remains carefree and is more interested in casual affairs than marriage. Lauren proves this when she hooks up with a waiter at the resort hotel where she and Sarah stay during a getaway together before the marriage takes place. Sarah had hoped the trip would bring her and Lauren close together again but is somewhat appalled by what she views as Lauren’s immature behavior.
As time passes in the story, it becomes clearer and clearer that the closeness the two women experienced when they were young is slipping away. Sarah leads a life of relative luxury without having to work, volunteering part-time, going to luncheons, and working out at the gym. Lauren, on the other hand, works in book publishing and ends up sleeping with a temp at the company. Despite their vastly different lives as adults, Sarah and Lauren each represent the person who knows the other best. Yet both begin to question their friendship, with Lauren pondering whether she is still friends with Sarah out of habit more than anything else.
“Alam captures something truthful and essential about the push- pull of friendship—the desire for closeness as well as the space to define ourselves—and admirably resists the urge to look down on his characters,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked: “Alam’s tale of a divergent friendship smartly reflects the trial and error nature of finding a mate and deciding how to grow up.”
[OPEN NEW]
Alam’s follow-up novel, That Kind of Mother, starts as a novel about the relationship between Rebecca, a white poet, and Priscilla, a Black woman who works as a nanny taking care of Rebecca’s first child. Then the narrative shifts as Priscilla dies in childbirth and Rebecca adopts Priscilla’s newborn son, and Rebecca has to learn what it means to be part of an interracial family. The story reflects part of Alam’s own background, as he is the son of Bangladeshi parents married to a white man with two adopted Black sons. The novel addresses the power imbalances in interracial relationships but also the way life changes when you become a parent and how all of that is affected by issues of class.
A writer in Kirkus Reviews was impressed by how Alam confronts the “controversial” topics related to race and class. They found his approach “insightful, intrepid, and truly impressive.” They also appreciated Alam’s ability to “write remarkably convincingly from a woman’s perspective.” Carla Jean Whitley, in BookPage, agreed, calling the book “a meditation on race and the challenges and joys of parenting” and writing that “Alam explores these issues with grace.” Helen Schulman, in the New York Times Book Review, had a somewhat different take, as she described the novel as “both provocative and vexing.” She appreciated how Alam “shrewdly explores the complexities of caregiving as employment,” but she struggled with the character of Rebecca, whom she called “well meaning but self-involved, even myopic.” Nonetheless, Schulman praised the book for how it portrays “all-consuming, passionate and annoying parental love.”
Alam’s next novel, Leave the World Behind, was not only a finalist for the National Book Award, but it was also adapted into a feature film starring Julia Roberts. As with That Kind of Mother, Alam’s follow-up is a novel concerned with the intersection of parenthood, race, and class. It focuses on a family of four, including two teenagers, who rent a luxurious home on Long Island for a week’s vacation. Before long, however, the home’s owners arrive in a panic, with news that a blackout and maybe worse has swept New York City. The six people are cut off from the world, with no cell-phone service, internet, or television. That the home’s owners are Black surprises the white family, who now have to figure out to adjust to each other in a suddenly uncertain world. Leave the World Behind was written and published in the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it reflects a world where its readers were in lockdown and uncertain about the future. Alam creates suspense out of that mystery, as the characters, who are strangers to each other, have to decide how much they can trust each other.
Afia Atakora, in the New York Times Book Review, praised Alam for his “wry observations” and compared the book to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, noting though that this story’s tension comes from “the breakdown of interior constructs” rather than external danger. Atakora described the book’s conclusion as “breathless” and “undeniably haunting.” Writing in USA Today, Emily Gray Tedrowe was enthusiastic, describing the book as a “perfectly-engineered thrill ride” and possibly “the best thing you can read about one of the worst things you can imagine.” She wrote that Alam “combines deft prose, a pitiless view of consumer culture and a few truly shocking moments.” She also appreciated how the “sharp commentary on social milieu widens into something less definitive, more interesting.” The result is “an exceptional read that will stay with you long after you’ve sped through its final pages.”
Porter Shreve, in the Washington Post, was just as enthusiastic, calling the book “a genuine thriller, a brilliant distillation of our anxious age, and a work of high literary merit that deserves a place among the classics of dystopian literature.” Jakob Hofmann, in TLS: Times Literary Supplement, called Leave the World Behind an “excellent apocalyptic novel” that “mines, with disarming plausibility, the brittle rules of contemporary bourgeois society.”
Entitlement, Alam’s next novel, is another story of mismatched people thrust into relationship. Brooke is Black and a former teacher who now works for an eighty-three-year-old white billionaire helping him decide how to distribute his fortune. As Brooke spends more and more time in the midst of tremendous wealth, her own ideas and sense of self start to change. The novel explores contemporary American society and how it might be a new kind of Gilded Age.
In the Washington Post, Elizabeth Hand wrote that there is a “similar sense of dread” in Entitlement as there was in Leave the World Behind, with a “steady poisonous drip of racism, generational wealth, classism and real estate envy.” She praised the story for moving “propulsively as a thriller” and wrote that the character of Brooke “commands the reader’s sympathy and compassion.” Joseph O’Neill, in the International New York Times, called Alam a “male novelist who specializes in female viewpoints.” O’Neill described this book as a “psychological thriller that subtly turns into a vicious expose of affluent liberalism.” Writing in the Spectator, Jude Cook noted that the book is set in 2014, during the Barack Obama administration, and he enjoyed how the novel “is canny enough to wrongfoot the reader by characterising both Brooke and [the billionaire] against type.” Cook praised “Alam’s customary alertness to small details” and called the book an “engrossing exploration of the pitfalls of privilege and philanthropy.”
[CLOSE NEW]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, May, 2018, Carla Jean Whitley, review of That Kind of Mother, pp. 20+.
International New York Times, September 24, 2024, Joseph O’Neill, “An Old White Billionaire Mentors a Young Black Woman in the Art of Philanthropy,” review of Entitlement.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2016, review of Rich and Pretty; March 15, 2018, review of That Kind of Mother.
New York Times Book Review, July 15, 2018, Helen Schulman, “Nature vs. Nurture,” review of That Kind of Mother, p. 18L; October 25, 2020, Afia Atakora, “Private Property,” review of Leave the World Behind, p. 12L.
Newsweek, October 4, 2024, Alan H. Scott, author interview.
NPR Weekend Edition, May 6, 2018, “In ‘That Kind of Mother,’ a White Mom, a Black Son,” author interview; September 14, 2024, “A Billionaire Gives Away His Fortune in Rumaan Alam’s ‘Entitlement,'” author interview.
Publishers Weekly, February 15, 2016, review of Rich and Pretty, p. 37.
School Library Journal, May, 2016, Catherine Coyne, review of Rich and Pretty, p. 61.
Spectator, September 14, 2024, Jude Cook, “Heart of Gold,” review of Entitlement, p. 32.
TLS: Times Literary Supplement, December 18, 2020, Jakob Hofmann, “American Carnage: Tales of Post-Apocalyptic Calamity, Social Awkwardness and Espresso,” review of Leave the World Behind, p. 26.
USA Today, October 6, 2020, Emily Gray Tedrowe, “Alam’s ‘World’ Is Scary, Timely,” review of Leave the World Behind, p. 5B.
Washington Post, October 5, 2020, Porter Shreve, “Rumaan Alam’s ‘Leave the World Behind’ Is a Brilliant Suspenseful Examination of Race and Class,” review of Leave the World Behind; September 16, 2024, Elizabeth Hand, “In Rumaan Alam’s ‘Entitlement,’ Money Can Drive People Crazy,” review of Entitlement.
ONLINE
Curbed, https://www.curbed.com/ (September 13, 2024), Clio Chang, “Rumaan Alam Moved to New York With a Bottle of Acqua di Giò and $300,” author interview.
Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/ (September 17, 2024), Jane Ciabattari, “Rumaan Alam on Creating a Fictional World of the One Percent,” author interview.
London Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com (September 7, 2024), Emma Brockes, author interview.
Michigan Quarterly Review, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu (November, 2023), Sarah Anderson, author interview.
Millions, http:// www.themillions.com/ (June 7, 2016), Edan Lepucki, “Neither Gift nor Curse: The Millions Interviews Rumaan Alam.”
NPR Web site, http:// www.npr.org/ (June 12, 2016), Linda Wertheimer, “Rich and Pretty Author Rumaan Alam Captures Lives Very Different from His Own.”
Powell’s, https://www.powells.com (October 28, 2020), Rhianna Walton, author interview.
Rumaan Alam website, http://rumaanalam.com (November 14, 2024).
Rumpus, http:// therumpus.net/ (June 30, 2016), Jason Arthur, review of Rich and Pretty.
Time Online, http:// time.com/ (July 15, 2016), Daniel D’Addario, “Rich and Pretty Author Mines Life for Inspiration.”*
No bio.
my first new york
Sept. 13, 2024
Rumaan Alam Moved to New York With a Bottle of Acqua di Giò and $300
Portrait of Clio Chang
As told to Clio Chang, a Curbed writer who covers everything New York City
Alam with his then-boyfriend in 1999, during the summer he moved to New York City. Photo: Rumaan Alam
Rumaan Alam came to New York to make it in publishing. One could safely say he has accomplished his goal: His new novel, Entitlement, comes out next week, and an earlier book, Leave the World Behind, was turned into a feature film starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, and Ethan Hawke. We spoke with Alam about his first days in the city, which were much less glamorous — sleeping on the floor in Fort Greene, eating potato chips for dinner, and buying dress shirts in a bag for his first job at Condé Nast.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I have a very strong memory of visiting New York in 1996, the summer of my junior year in high school. My family rented a short-term stay at an apartment in midtown and it was really dingy and hideous. But my parents let me kind of roam around and do whatever I wanted to do. We all went to see a Broadway show and then I went on my own to the ticket booth and got tickets to see A Delicate Balance and An Ideal Husband alone. I was a dorky 16-year-old, and I had this exhilarating feeling of, I’m in New York City, I’m seeing a play! It was a formative experience.
Then I was a part-time writing student at Oberlin College and I worked at the one coffee shop in town and I was so broke. I knew I wanted to move to New York and work in publishing, but in the pre-internet era, it was very abstract to me how you would accomplish that. A woman I worked with at the coffee shop wanted to move to New York also. Her dad was going to drive her there, and she was like, “You can come with us.” My parents were not very supportive; they’re Asian immigrants and wanted us to be physicians or lawyers or something that was really legible to them. So our relationship was fraught at the time, but they had given me some presents for graduation. My boyfriend drove me to the local shitty department store and I returned them all and bought a bottle of Acqua di Giò. I moved to New York in 1999 with that bottle of cologne and probably $300.
I had a good friend from college who at the time worked at ABC News, and she and I hatched a plan to be roommates. Somehow, she found us an apartment in Fort Greene for $1,400. It was in a brownstone that had been sort of hollowed out and converted into really crappy apartments, and ours was on the second floor. It was a two-bedroom, but it was one of those brownstone conversions where it was a two-thirds–to–one-third space distribution because of the staircase. So Michelle, my roommate, had the big room, and I had this teeny, tiny room with a twin bed that was actually just a mattress on the floor. I went to Office Depot and bought plastic drawers that I put in the closet; that was my dresser, and I had a computer sitting on the floor. I had nothing, but it was a really sweet place in a beautiful, vibrant neighborhood that had just been so neglected. I was really happy there. I remember when I was living there, it was big news when a house in Fort Greene sold for more than a million dollars. It was in the Times.
Alam at a friend’s apartment his first summer in New York.
I had met this woman Kim France at Oberlin at a party my professor had for alumni who worked in publishing. She was working at Condé Nast, and I was very interested in fashion and was fussy about the way I dressed. This woman could clearly see that. She said to me as I was leaving, “I’ll see you in New York at the Barneys Warehouse Sale.” I didn’t know what that meant — I had no idea what she was talking about. But at some point, I secured her email address and I emailed her. She wrote me back and the entirety of her email was in the subject line and it just said, “Come see me at Condé Nast.” Again, I had no idea what any of that meant. But I went to Condé, which had just moved into 4 Times Square, and I was sent to meet with a kind of legendary HR person who was one of those people you could just tell had had a horse at some point in her life. She was very grand, but she was also very nice to me. She said, “Well, men don’t do well at Condé Nast.” But she was like, “We’ll think about it.”
I was so broke I would buy potato chips and cigarettes and that’s it. That’s all I ate. I worked at this coffee shop on Atlantic Avenue and I remember bringing the scones home to eat for dinner. And then Kim sent me an email. Again, the entire message was in the subject line and it just said, “Hey, come work at Lucky and be my assistant.” And it saved me. I remember having a little bit of cash and going to Century 21 and being like, Okay, I have to buy real clothes. I’m pretty sure I bought those dress shirts that come in a plastic bag, and I thought I was so clever because I was like, I can’t buy pants, but I can buy Dickies and they kind of look like pants.
Alam and a friend in 1999. Rumaan Alam.
Even once I had a job — I was the assistant to the editor-in-chief — I made $25,000 a year, which was actually $3,000 more than the other assistants made. But I had all these perks. I had to go to the newsstand in the mornings and buy the Times, the Post, and the Daily News. On Wednesdays, I had to buy the Observer. And on Thursday or Friday, I had to buy whatever glossy magazines came out. Once, I was trying to do a second transaction to buy a pack of cigarettes and the guy who worked there was like, “You could just charge them to her.” And I was like, “Oh no, I could never.” He was like, “Trust me, you could.” And so then I would just charge them to her account. Nobody gave a shit; it just did not matter at all.
I spent a lot of time by myself on the weekends. There was nowhere to buy the newspaper in Fort Greene so I used to walk to Park Slope to a fancy bodega and buy the Sunday paper, which was like $3. And then I would go home and read it and then I would have nothing to do. So I’d walk to a used bookstore on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope and go look at books. I wrote and I read and just kind of lived inside of my head, I suppose. I remember trying to go to the late night at MoMA thinking maybe in some fantasy world some cute guy named Brian would notice me. That’s the level of delusion that’s pertinent when you’re still postadolescent.
Over time, I became good friends with two of my colleagues. I remember we used to just walk around and try to go shopping, but we couldn’t buy anything. So I guess that’s window-shopping. I really cared a lot about clothes, and we would walk to Barneys and be like, “Ah, someday.” And then we’d go to Century 21 and it’d be like, “Oh, I still actually can’t afford this, either.” And we would go to the Steven Alan store, which was such a big deal in that period of time, or Opening Ceremony. I would just dream about the kind of life I thought I was going to have. I remember I bought a pair of Miu Miu shoes that I loved so much from a store I think is gone now — Otto Tootsi Plohound. It was the most ridiculous store, and they were the most ridiculous shoes: blue suede, square-toed loafers. But I loved them so much, and it really mattered to me to have things I felt were rarefied and special and expensive — and that signaled I had a sense of discerning taste. In part, it’s because I worked at a fashion magazine in this environment where that’s what people cared about. I’m sure I wore them into the fucking ground.
Interviews
Powell's Interview: Rumaan Alam, author of 'Leave the World Behind'
by Rhianna Walton, October 28, 2020 4:00 PM
Leave the World Behind
I spoke with Rumaan Alam on the same day that his third novel, Leave the World Behind, made the shortlist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The dark — and darkly funny — story of how an upper-middle-class white family from Brooklyn and a wealthy Black couple from the Upper East Side cope with the possible end of humanity, while accidentally sharing a vacation home, Leave the World Behind uses the tropes of horror to explore the real effects of race, class, and technology on relationships and survival. Chillingly plausible, critical, and generous, Leave the World Behind is a gripping combination of can’t-put-it-down thriller and a meticulous excavation of the ways adults perpetually succeed and fail in creating a just and stable world. It's a delight to present Alam's riveting novel as Volume 89 of Indiespensable.
Rhianna Walton: I read Leave the World Behind during an especially bad wildfire season in Oregon that kept us housebound, and that coincided with ongoing COVID-19 restrictions, political violence downtown, a windstorm, and a blackout. It made me second-guess calling the novel dystopian because that implies future doom… How do you classify the novel, and has the way you think of it shifted between the writing of it and the current American moment?
Rumaan Alam: It's a great question. Did you ever read that Kathryn Schulz piece in the New Yorker about the Big One?
Rhianna: I read part of it and then I thought, I can't.
[Laughter]
Alam: It's actually too scary. Dystopian as a way of categorizing fiction has more to do with the reader's discomfort for what's being presented than it does with defining an actual category of literature. It's a way of holding it further away from us.
Think about Station Eleven and the way that Emily St. John Mandel is writing about a flu; and then think about what our contemporary reality is. Or, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam and Oryx and Crake, which is such an extraordinary trilogy — it feels distant because we see it through the lens of genre.
It's just an illusion. Margaret Atwood is writing realism. And Emily St. John Mandel is writing realism.
I don't know if you've ever read Jane Smiley's The Last Hundred Years Trilogy. It covers 100 years of an American family's life, from 1920 to 2020. In 2020, she describes a region of this country as being on fire.
Is that dystopian or is that just real? I don't think I ever thought of Leave the World Behind as engaged in whatever we want to call dystopian. I always thought of it as realism.
I'm conscious of the fact that it's using the tropes and conventions of the thriller or horror. It's dipping into what we have seen as various genre conventions to tell us something about reality.
Indiespensable Volume 89
Leave the World Behind in slipcase
Indiespensable is Powell's literary fiction subscription club. Click below to discover our newest selection and peruse past volumes.
Learn More »Rhianna: It’s not just the outside elements of disaster — the blackout, the warfare, the weird animal migrations — that feel eerily relevant. The characters and the narrator are also hyper-aware of the age, gender, and racial stereotypes at play in human interactions in 2020, and often think about the ways they’re deviating from social expectations. I’m thinking, for example, of how Amanda tries to compensate for racist thoughts with carefully constructed, progressive counter-thoughts, but they all do it. It’s very funny, but it’s also very now, the way your characters struggle with the disconnect between their private thoughts and how they wish to present, or feel they need to present, outwardly.
Alam: [Laughs] Thank you. First of all, I am especially thrilled when people sense humor at play in this book. I wanted it to feel funny. It does feel funny to me. I don't know if readers are always having the experience of laughing, in some ways because I think readers are conditioned to seeking permission to laugh. Especially, an uncomfortable laugh can feel like, Am I supposed to recognize this and find it funny?
A lot of it is very comic by design. I'm pleased whenever readers have that same feeling.
In terms of that distance that you're describing between what you think you're presenting about yourself and what you know is inside of yourself, this feels very human to me.
When Barack Obama was running for office in 2008, I feel like he used to tell this story on the stump about how his own grandmother was the kind of person who would hold her purse more tightly if she passed a Black man, conditioned by all of society to fear blackness and understand it only through the lens of crime, and that he himself, as a beloved grandson who was Black, could not disrupt that.
It's OK to acknowledge that many of our attitudes are very deep inside of us and have come from an overwhelming immersion in a culture that we didn't design, and that the only hope we can have toward real progress is to look at that stuff and where you come up short and be willing to have that uncomfortable laugh or whatever it is.
I don't know if this is a moment of reckoning, but I do think it’s an opportunity for introspection at least.
Rhianna: The novel explores that process really effectively. At the same time that the reader is criticizing or laughing at the characters, they’re thrust into sympathizing with them too, because the characters’ biases illuminate the reader’s own.
The six people inside of this house represent all of us.
Alam: The book gives you every feeling that when the Black people arrive at the home possessed by white people, something bad is going to happen.
They're going to commit a crime. They're there to trick these people. There's something nefarious in them. The book establishes that and tells you that you're right to be on your guard, just as Amanda is on her guard.
When she says, "They don't look like the kind of people who could own a house this nice. They could clean it. They do maybe look like a maid and a handyman," the reader is supposed to recoil, but also think, Well, maybe she's right. Maybe this is a scam.
The narrative could have done that. It doesn't. It's more interesting for the fact that it destabilizes you twice. It makes you feel that you're in Amanda's same boat. Then it abandons that. It changes the direction. It's an act of misdirection in which the reader is implicated as well as the characters.
That's speaking to a reader of every race. There's no reason a Black reader wouldn't have exactly that same experience of thinking these people have come to commit a crime. The book suggests that's what’s happening, but it's not what's happening, you know?
Rhianna: I think we're conditioned that way socially now, as well. How we engage with people is so mediated that someone coming to your door, whom you don't know, especially in these circumstances, is automatically going to put you on your guard. Then you add in the racial element and it just gets more complicated.
Alam: Also, that conditioning is coming not just from our political consciousness or how we were raised. You could have been raised in the most politically enlightened circumstances. You could be a Black person. You would have a completely different perspective on how race functions in the country, but we're also raised by the culture itself.
You are groomed by television to always understand white people as the protagonists of the story. That's just how it works. That's how the culture functions. It's hard to bear too much individual responsibility for that because you did not, at age six, when you were first watching sitcoms, make those sitcoms. You can't help what you've been educated in.
Rhianna: One of the things that I found super interesting when thinking about how perspective functions in the novel is the omniscient narrator.
I don’t think I’ve encountered anyone like them before — they take such an active role in the narrative. It can be difficult to determine where the characters’ thoughts end and where the narrator's commentary on the content and quality of those thoughts begins. How did you develop this narrative voice, and what do you feel it allows you to explore in the novel?
Alam: I have a couple of different thoughts on this. One is that I love a trope of cinema in particular where people are speaking over one another. One person is saying one thing, that person is saying another thing. They don't quite finish their thoughts. They shift the nature of the conversation. Unfortunately, the best example of this is a filmmaker who is very complex to talk about: Woody Allen. Woody Allen's films do capture a sense, I think, of how conversation unfolds at a dining table. It feels very real to me when you see that in films.
That is really fascinating to me, where you can't always determine who is saying what or why they're saying what. It's just something I love doing in books. I really enjoy that challenge as a reader.
I think it approximates how reality works a little. There's a lot of conversation in this book. In some ways, the reader inhabits the same space as the characters, this place of really not knowing what's happening.
Several early readers described the book to me as theatrical, which I think is very interesting. That it feels like you're watching a dramatic presentation of characters on a stage, and there's this intimate thing where you're watching it and you're trying to figure out what's happening yourself.
I had three editors on this book, and I can't remember which editor said this. At some point, one of the editors said to me, "Even if the characters don't know something, the reader needs to know more," which is a really interesting observation.
I had to figure out how to make sure the reader knew what was happening, even if the characters are debating their inability to comprehend what's happening. The way that I accomplished that is by introducing a larger narrative voice, which you've identified.
To me, that narrator is like God, basically. It feels like something you would read in a 19th-century novel. It does not feel especially contemporary. Most of the great novels that I have read in the last 10 years have been written from a very, very tight third person that you almost understand as a first person. If you think about Ben Lerner's or Rachel Cusk’s books, it's a very psychologically penetrating perspective, like the "she" is actually just an "I."
That's how my first two books are written, where the perspective is so close to the characters that it basically is inside of them, even though it's pulled back just enough so that it's referring to them as players on a page.
This book is totally different. The power dynamic is completely different, where six people all exist on the page, and God can go into their minds and tell you exactly what's happening. God can also provide some context on what's happening that they don't know.
I had a lot of fun with that. When the book says, "Later"; when the book implies an intelligence among the trees; when it implies a cause-and-effect relationship between an insect bite and what happens next. It just drops these things and moves on. They’re not the focus of the story. When the book tells you a plane crashed, and then this television star died, and then this man died on the subway, it turns the reader into Sherlock Holmes.
You're trying to piece it together and make it make sense. Ultimately, it doesn't make sense. You cannot make sense of it, because you are still in the same place as those characters. If those characters knew all that information, it would not help them. There's no takeaway, because they still don't know what's happening, and neither does the reader.
If anything is going to save us, it's probably going to be one another.
Rhianna: As I was reading, I sometimes got the impression of being the narrator’s co-conspirator — someone with enough critical distance to judge the characters — but at the same time, that insight just deepened my identification with them, and made their worries and dread feel that much more real and possible within my own life. It was a pretty extraordinary experience.
Alam: That's lovely. That's what I want. I want you to feel like they're real people whom you see wholly, as much as one ever can with a fictional construct; but that you can also understand them as cogs in a fictional machine that's having a particular effect on you.
It's not a postmodern joke, the way that those great stories by Barthelme possess a sense of their own fiction. The strategy here is more that you have to feel that these people are real, even if you understand that the story is pretend and it's trying to get you to feel a certain way.
There has to be that sense of verisimilitude. You have to feel like, What if this happened to me?
Hopefully, that is part of the reading experience for people.
Rhianna: That experience of verisimilitude really hit home for me when the novel delves into the experiences of childhood and parenting during a crisis.
There's a wonderful line in the novel where you talk about the "private conspiracy of childhood," which is just one of many astute observations about how children see the world and their families. I was really taken with how you conjure the atmosphere of childhood — the smells, the tactile sensations, the vision that kids have, because I think that’s really difficult to do well. I'd love to hear about why children were key to writing this story for you, and how you approach writing from a child's or a teenager's perspective.
Alam: I think a couple things. First of all, parenthood is an important part of my life, and it is the perspective through which I see things artistically.
That said, it's so hard to talk about with this book. It's an important point of access for me for the book, but my hope is that it's a book that yields to a reader who isn't a parent — that the reader can understand that they're wired to care about what's going to happen to the future of the species.
I think kids are really hard to write about, actually. To be a kid is to be a little illogical. Often what happens is writers try to do something really stylized to communicate that particular disconnect of logic. Style helps readers understand the psychology.
In this book, I think the attention to style is the same throughout the book. What changes are the details and the perspective. I think [the children’s sections] feel a little heightened, and frankly, a little magical. I almost wrote about them the way that I write about the animals in the book.
I had much easier access to the adult psychology. The kids' psychology felt a little more unknowable to me, and so I reduced them almost to animals, like when Archie thinks about sex. He thinks about it in a very animal way. It's just his wiring. Rose is a little younger, and at the end of the book, almost seems to be following some instinct that wouldn't have made any sense to the adults.
That feels to me like what childhood is. You're guided by some kind of animal instinct, and you haven't learned entirely how to tamp that down.
Rhianna: I’m thinking of my youngest child now and the weird things she does, like dipping her hair in her milk.
Alam: The other day, my eight-year-old was in the backyard, and I was watching him through the kitchen window. I saw him get down on his knees and lick the grass. He was like, I just needed to know.
Kids are… there's something weird about them that's very hard to fix in language.
Rhianna: I love the way you capture them in the novel. Rose and Archie are magical and mystical in their outlook, which is a nice counter to what the adults are experiencing.
Clay has this great quote where he reflects: “It was a hell of a thing to not be able to keep your kid safe. Was this how everyone felt? Was this, finally, what it was to be a human?” Parenting intensifies the trauma of what’s happening by reinforcing the adults’ fragility and ineptitude to keep their kids safe.
Alam: That's the fundamental betrayal of the parent. You can’t assure children that they're never going to hurt themselves on the playground. You can't assure them that they will never have hurt feelings at school. It's all you want to do. You just can't do it.
People's kids get sick. It's so terrifying because there's nothing you're able to do. It's not a question of morality. It's a question of terrible, terrible luck.
That's the bargain. That's the risk that you take when you care about somebody else. My point of access into that is parenthood. It doesn't have to be. It could be childhood. You can't protect your parents either.
It's a risk of being a human being. It's maddening and crazy to think about. We all know that that's the risk. We all know it. We can't dwell on it because we'd lose our minds.
Rhianna: In a review of one of your earlier novels, That Kind of Mother, Atlantic critic Hannah Giorgis writes that one of the book’s chief concerns is: “What obligations do people — strangers, friends, colleagues — have to one another? Can love ever transcend the strata of race, class, and entitlement?” As we’ve been discussing, these ideas definitely carry over into this novel, perhaps most clearly in the character of Ruth, who repeatedly returns to the idea that “to care for other people felt something close to resistance.” What is it about the idea of love transcending difference that attracts you as a writer, and how did writing a novel with dystopian or disaster elements change the way you explore it?
That narrator is like God, basically.
Alam: Ruth is a softie, isn't she? In the end, she's holding onto something about reality that we have to hold onto in moments of urgency: We understand that our role as a human being is to care for others.
The implication in this book is that the six people inside of this house represent all of us. It's a way of thinking about how the whole world is going to deal with whatever's happening outside. Maybe that makes it more imperative to talk about love or to hold onto it. The stakes are so much higher.
This is a dark book. I have to have some kind of hope. If anything is going to save us, it's probably going to be one another.
The implication in this book is that young people might. That reflects my own political perspective that the most interesting generation, the most interesting people I know politically, are young people for whom progressivism is not a political stance but a grounding in reality.
Our kids' generation, they're amazing. They have a kind of grasp of what is happening in the world that I don't think their parents do.
Rhianna: I agree. One of the things that makes reading this book so terrifying is that you've got these wonderful young voices, and you worry that they're not going to make it.
Alam: As George says, men of his generation have messed a lot of things up. This is a story that masquerades as dystopian or thriller or horror, but fundamentally, this is a very realistic book.
Rhianna: Nothing in this novel felt far away. Everything the characters are grappling with internally and externally is totally possible and seems to be happening in some form in the U.S. or across the globe.
Alam: I don't know if this happened to you in Oregon in March, but [on the East Coast], what did we do when we heard the schools were going to be closed, etc.? We went shopping. We bought the things that we thought would comfort us and that we needed: coffee, coffee filters, dried beans, whatever it was.
The things that we bought tell us a story of who we think we are. A certain kind of person bought Rancho Gordo beans. A certain kind of person bought Cup of Soup. You know what I mean? It's a reflection of where you see yourself or how you are situated in the class hierarchy. It affirms that the only way that we have to identify ourselves in this culture is via the things that we buy.
Rhianna: That’s actually something I wanted to ask you about.
Materialism and the idea of safety as a luxury are dominant themes in the novel, with the vacation home and its many amenities serving as a metaphor or even synecdoche of these ideas. I was especially intrigued by the dissonance between the novel’s insistence that stuff doesn’t equal safety or survival, and how the house serves as an oasis — even at the end, when as far as we know, the whole eastern seaboard is dead or dying, the electricity is still on, there’s water and food… Why did you decide to keep these basic comforts intact?
Alam: In part, it's because you know by that point what an illusion it is. They still have power. It feels like a glitch, but whatever. You know that George has that closet full of dried pasta downstairs.
They're going to eat all that food. It will be gone someday. Then, where are you? It's more interesting to me that they know they're going to be out of food. Clay's out of cigarettes, isn't he? What's that going to be like? They have electricity but they don't have television, which is all they want. All they want is the Internet. All they want is information.
The electricity, in a weird way, doesn't provide anything. It just makes it bright at night. It lays bare that these are all illusions. That's something we all do all the time. We all put a lot of faith in these things even though we know it's an illusion. The forces of global climate change will not affect people who can get onto superyachts, right?
You're talking about David Geffen and five other people. You're not talking about all of us. You could be really, really rich and not be able to access that. It's coming for us no matter what. We can pretend. We can do this thing that has happened in this country by bad-faith political actors and discuss it as a matter of belief. It's not a matter of belief.
The planet does not care if we believe in it or not. It's coming. It's already coming for people who have nothing. That's the particular unfairness of it.
Rhianna: This is making me think about that moment Clay has with the woman on the side of the road, which felt significant both in terms of his character and the reader’s sense of how society has already broken down.
Alam: Yes. In part because it's the first time we are out of the vacation home and it's the first time we encounter a different person. That person can't speak the same language, which is interesting. It is such a significant moral failing on Clay’s part. We all want to believe that we would do something differently in that situation.
If you were in a place in a moment of crisis and somebody was appealing to you for help, even if you didn't understand the language they were speaking, you would want to calm yourself down and think, OK, how are we going to proceed? What are we going to do? What should he have done? Should he have let this person into his car?
What's uncomfortable about that to me is that you get to look at him and say, You're bad. Hopefully, you also get to engage in the thought exercise of, What would I do?
One of the kindest things anyone's said to me about this book is, "This book is an indictment," which is such a beautiful way of thinking about it. It's hard not to see yourself in this book and hard not to imagine how you would respond and what the limits of your own humanity are.
Rhianna: I read that you’re an avid cook, and I really enjoyed the role food plays in the novel, in part because food is usually so central to vacation, but also because it both highlights the differences between the characters and brings them together.
How did food find its way into the heart of Leave the World Behind?
Alam: You’re right that it's an essential part of the vacation experience. It's an essential part of this deranged convivial experience that these people are having.
In a weird way, they're having an extended dinner party. I thought a lot about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which a party goes on for too long and reveals some crazy amorphous menace. It's because that's what people do. We are just animals. We eat.
What they do in Leave the World Behind is they eat, and they have sex. Those are the only things that actually happen in the book. Which is, I think, what happens on a great vacation, and it’s also just animal human survival stuff.
I love writing about food. Food is such a sensual pleasure, a satisfying pleasure. When my older son was a baby, I had a friend who said, "You have to teach your children how to eat because eating is one of life's great pleasures. What a gift to care about eating." I really think that's true.
It's like when Ruth talks about Tchaikovsky in the book. Art provides meaning for some people, and food can provide that for others.
I love imagining, as Amanda does [when making the pasta], Someday my kids will come home from college, and they'll be like, “Dad, can you make that thing with the butter?” I find that really lovely to imagine.
Rhianna: Yes, because food is a way of loving, and sometimes it's hard to know the right way to love your children. Also, it implies continuity.
Alam: Yes. Stability.
I think, like you're suggesting, you put yourself through all of that stuff. It becomes a physical expression of care, of comfort, security.
That's very meaningful. I mean, everybody needs to eat. It's a human imperative. The fact that there are people in this country who can't or don't is our moral failing.
Every parent wants to be able to provide their children with what they need. There's no parent alive who doesn't want to do that. To be able to do that well, whether it's making a box of macaroni and cheese or whipping up something complicated from scratch, it's like that act contains something.
In a way, we have very little at our disposal to hold these acts. You know what I mean? Food is just one of the things that we have to literalize our feelings.
I spoke with Rumaan Alam by Zoom on Tuesday, October 6, 2020.
÷ ÷ ÷
Rumaan Alam is the author of Leave the World Behind, Rich and Pretty, and That Kind of Mother. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Elle, New York Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He studied at Oberlin College, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Author photo of Rumaan Alam over the cover of his book, Leave the World Behind, laid over a background image that features a banner which reads "Zell Visiting Writers Series Interviews" as well as the University of Michigan, LSA, and Helen Zell Writers Program logos.
In the Apocalypse, I hope to Die Immediately: An Interview with Rumaan Alam
By Sarah Anderson
There aren’t many books that I remember reading as clearly as I remember Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind. It was 2020, and I was looking for escape. This book offers that—the writing propulsive, the pace breathless, so much so that I kept sneaking away from my remote job during the day to keep reading it. But it was a different kind of escape—an immersion in a new world, yes, but one with its own set of horrors. The apocalyptic images in this book continue to haunt me years later—hundreds of deer running from an unknown threat, an inexplicable flamingo in the swimming pool, bloody teeth suddenly falling from everyone’s mouths. In this book, Rumaan Alam somehow perfectly taps into the darkest collective anxieties of American society, but with a story that you can’t look away from.
Recently, the book was back in the spotlight when Netflix released the trailer for the long-awaited adaptation, coming in December 2023 and starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Myha’la Herrold, Ethan Hawke, and other big names. In this wide-ranging conversation, I spoke with Alam about children’s books, his fear of animals, and microwave installation.
Rumaan Alam is the author of three novels: Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and Leave the World Behind. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and the New Republic. He studied writing at Oberlin College. Now, he lives in New York with his family.
Sarah Anderson (SA): To start, I saw that Leave the World Behind was back in the news recently because of the Netflix announcement. What was it like to see your work become a movie?
Rumaan Alam (RA): The [second time] I visited the set, I went to the studio, where they were shooting some of the interiors. And I saw the realized spaces that had only lived in my head, or I saw Sam and his team’s interpretation of that. And that was really strange. Because as you know, as a writer, you spend time with these made-up people, and these made-up places, and they have a kind of presence in your mind that you don’t always put all down on the page, right? Like it’s there in your head. But you don’t have to describe every component of the physiognomy or the layout of a place. And just to see someone’s take on it was strange. A very surreal experience.
SA: You mentioned that Leave the World Behind was not always narrated from multiple perspectives. Did you have a character that came to you first or was it in a different voice initially? And how did it arrive at its current form?
RA: I mean, even in its current form, which is divided among like six people, and then all of humanity, it’s more interested in the husband and wife at the center of the book. It begins with them. It tracks them more closely, I would say, than anyone else. But that was sort of the genesis of the book, following them in the way that any close third person would. The realization came from an editor who was the first editor on the book, Megan Lynch, a really smart reader, now the publisher at Flatiron books. And what she said to me is, “I understand that you want the reader to know what the characters don’t know. However, because the characters don’t know it, it’s extremely irritating to read this book.” And I think that’s a really good point.
So, I puzzled over that for a long time. And I realized that the solution was to simply have the book disclose directly to the reader everything that was happening, and that the book would be able to know everything inside everybody’s head and everything sort of the world over. That is how many novels of the 19th century work, they worked at the perspective of the Divine that could see the whole arc of a story. And it’s also the way a lot of children’s novels work. You know, there’s kind of a fairy tale quality. Fairy tale isn’t quite the right word, but it’s like an adult reading to a child where the adult is in control of the story and the child is simply listening to the story of Dorothy and the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. The voice of the adult is able to establish everything about the world the child is hearing about. And that was how I thought of the voice of this book.
SA: That’s an interesting comparison. You know, given the dark subject matter. It is like an adult fairy tale.
RA: Children’s books are so dark like that! I think it touches almost a primal comfort where, if you were lucky enough to have an adult read to you as a small child, you can remember that feeling of like, you’re not quite asleep, and you’re not quite thinking, and the story is kind of entering your brain through the voice of this person who cares about you. And it is an experience of reading in a way, but it’s also a different kind of experience. There’s something really powerful about that. I hoped that the book could emulate that. Comfort isn’t quite the word for this book, but [the feeling] that the book was in total control, and was telling you, “Here’s what’s happening. It doesn’t really make sense, much as The Wizard of Oz doesn’t make sense, really.” But the voice of the person reading to you when you’re seven is sort of in control of it. And I love that tension.
SA: On the note of fairy tales, or fables or that sort of thing… I feel like there are two types of readers in terms of apocalypse fiction– people who want to read to escape and not think about any of that. And then people who seek it out. I’m one of those people, because I’m like, “Tell me how bad it can get.” I imagine, having written this book that you might be in the latter camp. But I’m curious about your thoughts on apocalypse and the dystopian.
RA: It’s funny, I didn’t think of the book in genre terms quite in that way as I was writing it. And in fact, what I thought of it…I mean, I was told never to say this when we published the book, but I feel like I can say it now with the distance of a few years. I thought of it as a horror novel. And my publisher was like, “Don’t say that.” Horror as a genre, as an endeavor, has a specific audience who cares deeply about it, and my book doesn’t really obey the conventions of that.
I would argue that apocalypse, which people think of as a genre, is not really far from horror, strictly speaking, and it’s maybe one of the more existential forms of horror, because it’s about the extinguishing of all of human life, right? There is a lot of work in the culture walking toward that particular idea in this moment. I don’t know if that’s specific to a sense of larger collapse or if it’s a blip in a bigger cycle of civilization. It’s really hard to know the answer to that.
SA: Okay, I have one wildcard question. What do you think your niche would be in a post-apocalyptic society?
RA: Oh, I would hopefully die immediately.
SA: That’s my feeling. I call myself a First Wave girl.
RA: I can’t really do anything, you know. I have really bad eyesight. I’m not like a tough person. And I don’t have a skill like I wish I had. If I were a contractor, or if I were a homeopath, and I could make medicine or something… but no, I can’t.
SA: I like that you just said contractor given that character in Leave the World Behind: Danny the contractor, who serves as this last great hope of Clay and G.H. at the end of the world. They’re sure that somehow Danny is the one who will have answers.
RA: I’m really amazed by people who know how to take a pile of wood and make it into something. That’s an extraordinary talent. We have a microwave installed over our stove, and it broke recently. And my husband was like, “Oh, we have to buy a new microwave.” And then we bought a new microwave. And I was like, “Well, you know, we’re two educated people, physically healthy. Surely, we can figure out how to take that thing out and put this one in its place.” I was like, “Let’s watch YouTube. Surely it will tell us how to do that.” And I looked at it for 30 seconds and I was like, “There’s no way I could do this. There’s no way.” So, in a post-apocalyptic scenario where I wouldn’t even have access to YouTube to even tell me that I’m not able to do something–yeah, I would really be one of the first to go.
SA: That calls back maybe the scariest scene in the book for me, when Clay is lost without the GPS… Yesterday you spoke really eloquently about your experience watching the crane migration in Bangladesh, and how that inspired another scary image in the book, the flamingo scene. But then you mentioned that you hate animals. Can you expand on that?
RA: I have a response to animals of revulsion. I sort of recoil from them. There are many components to that. First, there’s some uncanny intelligence in an animal’s eyes that is unsettling, because you can never commune with an animal in language. And so, I can’t comprehend what their motives are, what is happening on the inside. And there clearly is something happening inside of there, right? There is, and we will never know it. And that is so freaky to me.
SA: Another idea I wanted to follow up on from last night’s talk is writers following their obsessions. You talked a little bit about people who write the same book over and over. I don’t think of you as that writer. It seems like your books, to me, cover a lot of range. What would you say your obsessions are?
RA: Well, there’s what I think my obsessions are. And then there’s what the person who’s reading the work from a different perspective would identify as my obsessions. And I don’t know what the gulf is between those two perspectives… I think the impulse to make art is to ask questions that don’t really have answers. So, a lot of times the artist is asking that question repeatedly because there’s no single or proper answer to the question. And the drive to ask the question is so powerful that they keep coming back.
SA: Do you have something that you feel yourself being repeatedly pulled back to?
RA: I’m very interested in money, in class. I’m interested in how class mitigates people’s experience of reality–people who accept objective reality, but don’t actually live it, because they don’t realize how it’s actually functioning in their life, with respect to class, with respect to sex, with respect to race. There are people who don’t understand that their experience of reality is mitigated by their race. They tend to be white, but maybe they’re not exclusively white. And that’s kind of an extraordinary thing to me.
I’m interested in intimate relationships. I’m interested in how conversation cannot progress or how conversation can hold something that isn’t really being said. I’m interested in familial bonds, in parenthood, in food. Food is a big one for me, to capture the texture of what is exciting about life on the page. I’m interested in sensual pleasure actually. That’s something that’s become much more interesting to me.
SA: You’ve called your next project “insane.” I love insane things. Is there anything else you’re willing to say about it?
RA: It’s mostly insane as far as I feel deranged from having been inside of it for so long. It is a book about money. And it’s a book about a relationship between people who are very different ages. I’m very interested, I don’t know if I realized this until I said it last night, but I’m pretty interested in older people. There seems to be, to me, a bias in contemporary fiction toward youth and adolescence, which is not that interesting to me. But being near the end of your life is interesting to me.
And so that’s what the book is about. It’s about someone who’s 83 and his relationship with a woman who’s 33. It’s not a sexual relationship, but it’s a relationship with its own charge. There are multiple ways to have a very intimate relationship. And sex is not the way I would look at this particular relationship. There is this thing between them that I do think exists in reality that I don’t see rendered a lot on the page. I think we’re interested in the big universal relationships of like lovers or parents, but there’s this other kind of thing that interests me.
That makes it sound less insane I suppose, than I made it sound on stage. But again, I think the insanity is simply being inside of a relationship between made-up people in a made-up place for a long part of your real life. [It’s] a kind of state of waking delusion.
SA: Before we finish, do you have any quick advice for writers at the start of their careers?
RA: Yes, the only advice that you should ever accept is that you have to read widely. I would be skeptical of any other advice. You have to, have to, have to read widely. You should read things you don’t like, you should read things that other people love, you should read things you don’t understand. And you should maintain that curiosity about reading for your entire life.
SA: Thank you so much.
RA: Thank you. This was so fun.
Sarah Anderson is a second-year MFA student in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. She is currently working on her first novel and on a short story collection that explores questions such as whether or not kangaroos are hot. She can be reached at sarahwan@umich.edu.
Interview
Novelist Rumaan Alam: ‘A lot of people have secret money – it can make you crazy with envy’
This article is more than 1 month old
Emma Brockes
His pandemic bestseller Leave the World Behind was made into a starry Netflix movie. Now the author is turning the spotlight on wealth. He talks about success, parenthood – and the mania of trying to make it in New York
Emma Brockes
Sat 7 Sep 2024 06.00 EDT
Share
Rumaan Alam wrote his first novel between the hours of 7pm and 2am every night. In the mornings, after getting his two boys up for school, he’d grab a nap, spend the day freelancing, fetch the boys and then, reminding his husband, David, not to talk to him after 7pm, he’d write for the entire evening and into the night. Three months later he had a book, then another and then, using the same brutal schedule, a third: Leave the World Behind, which changed everything. “It’s so common for people to talk about children as the death of the creative impulse,” says Alam. “But I really don’t think it is. It’s a spur.”
The 47-year-old is sitting in the cafe of the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan contemplating the weirdness of the last few years of his life. For Alam, there is some guilt attached to the timing of his good fortune; Leave the World Behind, a prescient novel about an apocalyptic event that maroons a bunch of affluent New Yorkers in the Hamptons, came out just as the pandemic hit. It was a huge instant bestseller, catching the moment but also transcending it, and was shortly followed by a movie adaptation for Netflix starring Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali. “It was such a terrible year for almost everybody, and it happened to be one of the best years of my career,” says Alam. “What could I do except be thrilled?” Plus, he points out, smiling, there was the extra, pandemic-era frisson of being happy, simply, that “we weren’t dead and could still have a livelihood”.
Alam’s writing is loose-limbed, expertly observed, flying along with the engine of a commercial novel and the fine eye of a literary one. He is slyly funny, on the page and in person, sensitive to the absurdities of life in general and the New York class system in particular. In Leave the World Behind, a bougie white Brooklyn family must navigate their own biases when the wealthy Black owners of their rented house show up on the doorstep, in flight from an unspecified cataclysm. In his new novel, Entitlement, Alam captures the experience of living in a city so wildly unaffordable that it bends all those without a trust fund out of shape. Brooke, a Manhattanite in her early 30s, gets a job working for a billionaire’s charitable foundation and – as many in the city do – finds herself disastrously adopting his lifestyle without the funds to pay for it. It’s about self-delusion, and magical thinking, and a city that values money above most other things.
It is also a book about waiting. With the exception of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, the typifying New York novel tends to characterise the city purely in terms of energy and hustle. Cleverly, Alam posits an opposing view. Entitlement is set during the first Obama administration in what Alam characterises as “a more innocent time”, when rents were (slightly) cheaper and the city was easier “to romanticise”. In his New York, Brooke and her friends are all waiting – for their fortunes to change; for their big moments to arrive; for something, anything to happen.
Above all, of course, they are waiting for money – “this metric for everything”, as Alam says, and that in Brooke’s case takes the shape of her hunger to own an apartment. “In American life, that was the abiding dream, and it is very powerful, even in New York City,” says Alam. “You might not want a white picket fence, but you want a piece of the thing, and that’s the result of decades and decades of cultural programming.” Even 15 years ago, a woman in Brooke’s position, in a well-respected but not highly paid job, could not remotely afford to buy a home in the city. And so, says Alam, “that tradition of looking for security, at this point in American life, is delusional. The only way to write about it is as a mania.”
Alam himself came to the city in his early 20s, straight out of college. He grew up in Washington DC, the son of two doctors and first-generation immigrants from Bangladesh, or as he puts it, “very traditional south Asian, immigrant, middle-class parents. Upper middle-class when I was growing up, and middle-class now.” (Doctors’ wages in the US have been dwarfed by those of tech and finance workers.)
His parents wanted him to enter a profession. He wanted to be a writer. “Magazine publishing was my realistic immigrant child compromise,” he says. While still a student at Oberlin College, a chance encounter at a party resulted in Alam getting a job as an assistant at Condé Nast, the kind of entry-level position usually reserved for nepo babies or trust fund kids, and he is very funny about the time he spent there. This was the last hurrah of the magazines, an era that, by today’s standards, looks avant garde in its excess. “One of my tasks was to do the boss’s expenses. So she’d rifle through her wallet and pull out every piece of paper, and be like ‘figure this out’. I’d just write, like, ‘magazine’ or ‘coffee’ on the top. And you’d take it upstairs to this teller, and slide it under, and she’d glance at it and count out the cash. I would always be going upstairs to get $200 reimbursement. Then I would do the full expenses from her corporate Amex, which was the hotels, and the clothing allowance.”
Alam, who was 22 at the time, could have been living in a Tom Wolfe novel, surrounded by money and its signifiers. For a young man who hadn’t grown up in New York, it took a minute to recognise the subtext when someone mentioned they’d “been to Brearley” (the poshest girls’ school in the city), or kept referring to “their mother’s house”. Trying to figure out who had money was, he says, like “looking for water underground”, and Alam found it fascinating. “There’s a lot of secret money,” he says. “If you’re a certain kind of person and go to a certain college and enter a certain profession, you realise there are these secret layers of money and pedigree informing other people’s lives. And once you’ve realised that, it can make you crazy with envy, or frustration.”
I’d have Zoom calls with Julia Roberts, while the kids were running around – none of it felt real
As an observation, this was a starting point for Entitlement, as was the cold eye Alam turned on the changing fortunes of that particular scene. When the magazine world started to tank in 2008, a lot of the women who had used it as a kind of “finishing school” had to look elsewhere. Some got their real estate licences. Many, as in Alam’s novel, went into “interior design”. And some “became consultants, or life coaches, which I just think is so funny, because – I don’t know what they know about life. ”
The other impetus for the novel was the experience Alam recently went through of watching his children, Simon and Xavier, enter their teenage years in the city. “My older son did say to me, not long ago: why don’t we have a country house?” His kids go to state school, but the family lives in an affluent neighbourhood of Brooklyn where plenty of people disappear to the Hamptons in the summer. On one level, says Alam, “that’s a ludicrous thing he said”, and he batted it easily away. On the other hand, he says, there can be vast disparities in the income of families within, for example, a single school setting. “If you’re a kid with a parent who works as a New York City subway conductor, which I’m sure is a great job, and you find yourself in a school where film stars go … I don’t know how you straddle that.”
Thing is, I suggest, you probably could afford a country house at this point.
Alam smiles. “Sure. Maybe. We’ll see how this book does.”
It wasn’t always like this. Alam and his husband had their kids in their early 30s, when money was tight. David is a freelance photographer. Alam had left magazines and was working as a freelance copywriter. When he took 11 weeks off and tried to bang out a first draft of the novel that would become Rich and Pretty, it was a financially perilous move. By the time he finished the book, he was so strapped for cash he was “paying the babysitter in coins. It got dicey there for a moment. But on we go.”
Throughout the production of those first novels, Alam found the experience of having young children incredibly galvanising. “A lot of unnecessary things fell away,” he says. “I was really able to focus in a different way. I focused on them, and I focused on the novel.” Occasionally, as parents do, he wonders: “What was I doing in the decade before I had children? It’s not like I was getting laid. I was just sitting around. Watching TV?”
skip past newsletter promotion
Sign up to Inside Saturday
Free weekly newsletter
The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.
Enter your email address
Sign up
Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
after newsletter promotion
I’m curious about his decision to set Leave the World Behind in a straight family. Novels don’t have to reflect the life situation of the author, of course, but it was an interesting choice by a writer in a two-dad household to focus on, in particular, the mother of the family. “Well, in some ways it was easier to see [them] with some clarity,” says Alam. He makes the comparison to one of his favourite writers, Anita Brookner, and how she wrote about the English. In some ways, for Alam, straight couples and their lives are another country, just as England was for Brookner, “a strange, isolated, Jewish daughter of eastern European refugees writing about real London; real fussy British society. Really taking apart all these aspects of English life at the time. And I bet she was better able to see it because she wasn’t part of it.”
As a gay dad, Alam turned a critical eye on what he calls “the most conventional parts of heterosexual society, which is in the playground, and the PTA, and the afterschool. And of course I spend most of my time in those circles with the moms. I feel like I really understand – I really watch.” One of his observations was the extent to which even the most liberal families cleave to conventional gender dynamics. “My circle is as progressive as it gets,” says Alam. “And I’m often shocked by how gendered and straight their lives are. You know; dad takes out the garbage, or dad plays golf,” while mom helps out at the PTA.
And then there is the role played in these circles by money. Initially, Alam’s editor suggested he make the heroine of Entitlement poor. But that didn’t work. It had to be about someone who had enough, but wanted more. Not only does Brooke think, vaguely, and with the surety of someone whose needs have always been met, that things will “work out”, but she is consumed by the need to have more. “The people I know who talk the most about money have no real experience of privation, and probably won’t,” says Alam.
He is talking about classic, middle-class rat race thinking: if we just got into a better postcode, the kids could go to a better school, with a better social setting, and then get into a better college. “And then if we can make $300k a year more easily, we could buy them a starter home.” (It’s telling that in many New York private schools, some element of financial aid is available to families earning less than $450k a year.) And of course these are currents to which Alam and his husband are not themselves immune.
Thanks to the success of Leave the World Behind, his own financial situation has vastly improved. But, says Alam, his new reality has had its surreal moments. For example, the family was in a rental house on Fire Island at the height of the pandemic when the film deal with Netflix and Higher Ground, the Obamas’ production company, was going through. “We were holed up in this house, we weren’t seeing anybody, we were just going to the beach. And I would have these Zoom conference calls with Julia Roberts and Sam Esmail’s producers and the studios, in a bathing suit, while the kids were running around. None of it felt real.”
His last novel may have tapped into our thirst for apocalyptic settings, but Entitlement imagines another worst-case scenario for many New Yorkers – that of running out of money and being banished to the suburbs. “It’s funny to me that to a certain class that is a fate worse than death,” says Alam. “Which is obviously crazy.”
The book’s opening line is a conscious nod to The Bell Jar. “The Bell Jar is about a lot of things. It’s about the experience of real medical emergency. Right? But the book also shows that derangement might be the most logical response to the condition of being a woman in postwar America.” In Entitlement, Brooke is similarly deranged, Alam says. “But maybe derangement is the most logical response to the conditions of contemporary life.”
Entitlement by Rumaan Alam will be published by Bloomsbury on 17 September. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Rumaan Alam on Creating a Fictional World of the One Percent
Jane Ciabattari Talks to the Author of “Entitlement”
By Jane Ciabattari
September 17, 2024
Rumaan Alam’s captivating, artfully nuanced fourth novel, Entitlement, revolves around the growing distance between the one percent and the rest of us. He features Brooke Orr, a Black woman who has left her teaching job at a Bronx charter school in 2014 to work for a nonprofit, helping Asher Jaffee, a self-made multibillionaire, give away his money. Her assumption is, she will be doing good. As she bounces between gritty subway stations and Bed-Stuy bars with friends, and concerts at Lincoln Center and dinners at Jean-Georges with Asher, Brooke is gradually seduced by the beyond-aspirational privilege of the super wealthy. Asher becomes her mentor, and she begins to fantasize about what he could give her, how little it would take to change her life upward. “Demand something from the world,” Asher instructs her. “Demand the best. Demand it.” Living on the fringe of Asher’s life gradually destabilizes Brooke (one longtime friend sees a newfound conviction in her eyes—or is it madness?). Then Alam ratchets up the stakes, building to a gripping, frenetic, revelatory finale. Our Brooklyn/Sonoma County email conversation took place during the last days of summer.
Article continues after advertisement
The video player is currently playing an ad.
Remove Ads
*
Jane Ciabattari: How have these recent years of pandemic and conflict affected your life, your family, your work, including the Netflix film Leave the World Behind, which premiered in December 2023 (and in which your family played a cameo), and the writing of and launch of your new novel, Entitlement?
Adulthood and its inherent changes and transitions can cause friendships to fray, intimacies to weaken (or deepen!)
Rumaan Alam: Well, the period of the pandemic was so difficult for so many my complaints about managing grade school on Zoom seem silly. Our family weathered that time happily enough, or the stresses and fears are largely forgotten, and now, in the way of recent history, those feelings seem distant. Similarly, the oddity of the film adaptation of Leave the World Behind feels removed from my current reality—something fun and interesting that happened to me once, a great story to tell at a party, a couple of names I’m now equipped to drop. The months I spent writing and revising Entitlement were their own challenge, I guess; writing a novel tends to feel like an uphill slog to me. But by the time the book’s publication rolls around I mostly forget that. It must be some psychic defense mechanism.
JC: What drew you to write about an ambitious young Black woman in the highly funded universe of nonprofit foundations, where billionaires, in this case self-made Asher Jaffee, maneuver the game of giving away money for tax credits and influence? What inspired Entitlement?
Article continues after advertisement
Remove Ads
RA: I wish I could pinpoint the genesis of this novel, or any project I undertake; perhaps then I’d be better able to jumpstart that process, and leap into a new manuscript or something. I think it’s more a matter of accrual over time. I’m not sure what I was thinking, really, whenever this book was first a spark in my brain, but I know that early on I had the idea of a novel about a woman who marries an apartment. Not literally, of course, but a woman choosing to buy real estate over settling down with a romantic partner. There is a ghost of that idea in Entitlement, but the book grew to be about a lot of other things I was thinking about: the nonprofit sector and philanthropy, the contrast between the comfortably middle class and the one percent, life in a pre-pandemic New York.
JC: How did you develop the character of Brooke Orr? Does she resemble anyone who is “real”?
RA: I’m not sure she resembles anyone real. I’m not all that sure the reader—indeed even I as the author—see her wholly, but then maybe we rarely do see people in full, even in reality. So maybe that makes Brooke as real as anyone else we encounter, in life or in fiction. She’s a mystery. She’s certainly not based on anyone, or at least as far as I’m aware. When my husband read this book he had the same reaction he’s had after reading my previous books, pointing out that the protagonist, indeed almost everyone on the page, is some version of me. Maybe he’s right.
JC: Your opening line places 33-year-old Brooke on the subway on her way to work: “It was a strange sultry summer, the summer of the Subway Pricker, but Brooke Orr had decided not to let that interfere with the business of life in New York.” We see her in the bustle and clatter of the subway, and imagine for the first time this strange attacker who threads through the rest of the novel with his “innocent” “timid violation.” This first time we meet him, his attack causes a delay that makes Brooke late to work in Asher Jaffee’s foundation office on West 36th Street, her first meeting with her new boss. Where did he come from? (And, no spoilers, yes, this line is like Chekhov’s gun on the wall.)
RA: The first lines of Entitlement are stolen from Sylvia Plath, whose sole novel has a truly arresting first line that I had to paraphrase because she uses the word queer instead of strange, a better word, for sure, but one with too specific a connotation for modern readers. (I apologized to Plath in the book’s acknowledgments; I hope for her forgiveness.) The Bell Jar was a touchstone for a lot of reasons that I will let readers discover for themselves. The Subway Pricker is a figure who haunts this book, I’m not sure why—maybe because I had a sense that it was a story that needed a specter.
Article continues after advertisement
Remove Ads
JC: What sort of research was involved in building Brooke’s world?
RA: A couple of summers ago, I had a long conversation with a woman I met at a pool party who works as a consultant for nonprofits. I didn’t take notes but I did remember our chat; that’s the kind of research I enjoy. This novel didn’t require me to settle into a library for days at a time but to do the kind of noodling on the internet most of us do. I had to check the auction records for paintings by Frankenthaler and Monet; I had to look at photos of the dining room at Jean-Georges; I had to remind myself what Barneys looked like; I had to figure out where Madonna’s Manhattan townhouse is. The most fun research I did was studying high end real estate listings to find a home for Asher Jaffee. The house I describe in the book is one that sold in the past couple of years. It is really beautiful.
JC: Brooke thinks of her new job as being about “doing good,” a principal valued by her mother Maggie, a white lawyer who heads an organization dedicated to reproductive justice. But her relationship with Maggie is fraught. Why does Brooke think of herself as a disappointment to Maggie?
The fact of obscene wealth, and the disparity in wealth so prevalent in this country and the world over, should in fact make more of us crazy.
RA: Don’t we all feel like disappointments to our parents? Maybe that’s just me. I suppose this is what my husband was getting at, in seeing me in every character.
JC: Brooke meets regularly with her two closest friends, Kim, and Matthew, former classmates at Vassar, where they once gathered in the one Poughkeepsie diner where “two and a half Black people could congregate unmolested.” Over time, Brooke’s new job, and her newfound sense of entitlement, lead to an estrangement. How do you explain this dynamic?
Article continues after advertisement
Remove Ads
RA: Adulthood and its inherent changes and transitions can cause friendships to fray, intimacies to weaken (or deepen!). This seems to me a familiar dynamic; it’s what my first novel is about. I was interested in this kind of strain being precipitated by a job, by a reordering of professional priorities. I think this is something that happens in real life, why not in a book?
JC: Asher Jaffee, now eighty-three, is drawn to Brooke. He takes her to lunch, begins to mentor her. As Brooke sinks deeper into his world, using his drivers, charging new clothes, taking meetings about giving away his money, she begins to fantasize about what he could give her—an apartment, her own perfect place. Her access to the idea of unlimited cash inflates her sense of self, changes her personality and her values. Is there a name for this? Is she going crazy?
RA: I think the name for this is in fact sanity. The fact of obscene wealth, and the disparity in wealth so prevalent in this country and the world over, should in fact make more of us crazy.
JC: There are moments throughout the novel when you shift from Brooke’s point of view to another’s. Kim, Asher, and others. Was that fluidity of perspective there from the beginning of your work on the manuscript? Where did it come from?
RA: This is a strategy I used in my previous book. It’s hardly new, a novel told from an almost divine perspective, the author a kind of god able to peer into the minds of whomever the book demands, but it is perhaps out of fashion. I find it very liberating; it makes the book much easier to handle, and I’m just lazy enough to want the book I’m writing to be as easy as possible for me.
Article continues after advertisement
Remove Ads
JC: I’m curious about what you’re working on now/next, especially after reading your post on X a few weeks back: “Told my editor about my new book today, felt exactly like when my children tell me long-winded stories that are mostly made up.”
RA: Oh I just worked up the courage to tell my editor about my next book—I’m hardly ready to tell anyone else! I’m habituated, after years of going to school, to feeling industrious once Labor Day has passed. So I’ll disappear into the writing of that soon. I should be ready to talk about it in two years or so, fingers crossed.
To listen to this broadcast, click here:
Play Audio
HOST: LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO
LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO: Rumaan Alam writes women well. His first acclaimed novel, "Rich And Pretty," followed two young women, best friends who grow up and then part. His new second novel, "That Kind Of Mother," begins as another story about a female relationship - this one between Rebecca, a white poet and first-time mom, and Priscilla, a black woman who works as her nanny.
RUMAAN ALAM: I think it is an inherently complex relationship and one that is not often discussed. I am somebody who has two children of my own. And my husband and I have had three different child care providers. And they were our employees, but we relied on them with the only thing that matters in our lives, which is our children. And so the level of trust and intimacy that is an important part of that relationship elevates it from a traditional understanding of what it is to have an employee or what it is to have an employer, I think.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So these two characters - their relationship is actually transformed when, suddenly, the families truly become a family. Rebecca adopts Priscilla's child. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because, obviously, there is not only the issue of their relationship, but there is a race issue and a class issue here, too.
ALAM: Absolutely. I think that the way that we talk about complicated political issues now is much more appropriate. We talk about the intersection between race and feminism, for example, or class and race. And I think that all of those concerns are really linked in the power dynamic at the center of this book. Rebecca is a white woman. Priscilla is a black woman. They come together as a family via adoption, but there is still a lot that separates them from one another. And that is what the book is trying to press on and tease out.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I mean, clearly, it's personal for you. You know, you've written about your sons, who are adopted. They're black. Your husband is white, as you've said, and described yourself - you're brown. Was this story drawn on your own experiences?
ALAM: Certainly not. I mean, this is - you know, the emotional truth in the book is very much my own. But you would have to know me pretty well to understand what in the text is autobiographical. I'll tell you one thing since we're friends now - that I do make spaghetti carbonara just like Rebecca does in the book. And I always guiltily throw a package of spinach into it. But this is a story about adoption using very dramatic and heightened circumstances. And in my own experience, adoption does not work this way. Our children were placed in open adoptions, and there is a certain amount of maternal agency in that choice. And in this book, I'm talking about the sort of sudden death of a character, the sudden erasure of someone. And the adoption almost feels like it does in myths - the child just arrives wholesale.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: One of the things that I've found really interesting in the book is the culminating scene where there is the, quote, unquote, "talk." And we've become so familiar now because of Black Lives Matter with that talk that African-American parents have specifically with their young black sons about the way that they deal with the police and the way that they may be treated in different spaces. But you have set this book in the last century. And, of course, that idea, that knowledge had not really penetrated white American consciousness then.
ALAM: That's right. There are two levels to this answer. One is that it's a great advantage to write about the past because I know how the story ends even if the characters inside the texts do not. And the reader knows how the story ends, too. So in the text when Rebecca talks about holding up Bill Cosby as a role model, the reader understands the ways in which Bill Cosby has failed to be the role model we all maybe once believed that he was. And the notion that black parents have historically provided to their sons this intelligence about what will happen to them upon becoming black men - this is a tradition that exists within the black community that I would not have known about had I not had black sons. And it felt really like an important opportunity to explore the ways in which black Americans have been having these conversations, and white Americans have not.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: We've heard a lot about the limitations of authors writing about things that they haven't experienced. There has been a lot of controversy about this, especially when we're discussing other races and even gender. Do you think that applies? I mean, do you think that that's something that you embrace?
ALAM: Sure. I think a lot of what that conversation is about is a particular power dynamic. And if there is a reader who is a woman or who is a black woman who reads this book and says, he's got it totally wrong, and I'm offended, I have to accept that. I hope that that will not be the case. And I think so much of it is in the approach. And I hope that readers can sense that my approach to writing about difference is from a point of a genuine desire to understand and depict something that I can't know firsthand. And I think a lot of the sensitivity around inhabiting a different perspective, whether it's race or gender or ability - people should be sensitive, and they should wade into this stuff carefully. And that's what I've tried to do.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Rumaan Alam is the author of "That Kind Of Mother." Thank you very much.
ALAM: Thank you.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=10
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"In 'That Kind Of Mother,' A White Mom, A Black Son." Weekend Edition Sunday, 6 May 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A537698505/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=356ae03c. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
Alam, Rumaan THAT KIND OF MOTHER Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $26.99 5, 8 ISBN: 978-0-06-266760-1
This story about a white woman who adopts her black nanny's son burrows deep into issues of race, class, and the nature of family.
Rebecca Stone is the attractive wife of a British diplomat, a talented poet, an admirer of Princess Diana (the book is set in the late 1980s and '90s), the sort of person who is equally adept at both attending and hosting parties. She lives in a tastefully decorated house in Washington, D.C.; wears designer clothes; drives a Volvo; cooks delicious, complex meals in her well-appointed kitchen. In short, she is, among other attributes, rich and pretty--which happens to be the title of Alam's well-received 2016 debut novel. With this, his second book, Alam further demonstrates his ability to write remarkably convincingly from a woman's perspective, credibly capturing even the particulars of childbirth and breast-feeding, not to mention the emotional challenges of balancing motherhood and fulfilling work. When we first meet Rebecca, she is about to give birth to a son, Jacob, an event that leads to a connection with a hospital breast-feeding consultant named Priscilla Johnson, who will become Jacob's nanny. Rebecca is white; Priscilla is black. But their relationship is far more nuanced than those bare facts may lead you to expect, and their story plays out in unpredictable ways. When Priscilla dies unexpectedly in childbirth, Rebecca instinctively moves to adopt her newborn son, a decision that will change Rebecca's life, her family, and her view of the world. Here Alam proves he is a writer brave and empathetic enough not only to look at life from the perspective of another gender and era, but also to boldly dive in and explore controversial topics, posing questions about the way we treat one another and the challenges of overcoming preconceptions. Digging through to uncomfortable truths, he emerges squarely on the side of hope.
With his second novel, Alam cements his status as that kind of writer: insightful, intrepid, and truly impressive.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Alam, Rumaan: THAT KIND OF MOTHER." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A530650839/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3da0f7f0. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
THAT KIND OF MOTHER
By Rumaan Alam
Ecco $26.99, 304 pages ISBN 9780062667601 Audio, eBook available
Rebecca Stone is overwhelmed by motherhood. That's not unusual for a first-time mother, but Rebecca's position may be: She's a poet with a well-to-do husband, and she has the resources to do something about it. At the hospital, she turns to Priscilla Johnson, who helps Rebecca and her newborn son, Jacob, adjust to breastfeeding. Before long, Rebecca insists Priscilla leave the hospital and become Jacob's nanny.
It's a near-perfect fit. Rebecca is able to resume her work as a poet--that is, sitting quietly and thinking until the words come. Oblivious to the power dynamics at play between a black woman and her white employer, Rebecca sees Priscilla as a confidante. Then Priscilla gets pregnant and dies during childbirth. Rebecca steps in to adopt her baby, Andrew, and the uneven dynamics of their relationship are now unavoidable.
In That Kind of Mother, Rumaan Alam (Rich and Pretty) delves into the complexities of female friendship and motherhood. Rebecca struggles to figure out whether she and Priscilla's adult daughter, Cheryl, are friends or relatives. The women meet for regular play dates with their children, and Rebecca is often startled by Cheryl's directness. Cheryl is quick to note that, no matter what Rebecca claims to think about race, Jacob and Andrew are different in ways big and small. Coconut oil isn't enough to moisturize Andrew's skin, for example, and the world will perceive him differently than it does Jacob. Rebecca is forced to reckon with the different worlds that her boys will face.
Alam explores these issues with grace, contrasting the experiences of these two women with those of Rebecca's idol, Princess Diana. That Kind of Mother is a meditation on race and the challenges and joys of parenting.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Whitley, Carla Jean. "THAT KIND OF MOTHER." BookPage, May 2018, pp. 20+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A537055051/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=59897e8b. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
THAT KIND OF MOTHER By Rumaan Alam 291 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.
One would have to be living under a rock to be unaware of our current frantic and impassioned conversations over issues of cultural appropriation, political correctness and bigotry. Lionel Shriver's keynote speech at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival, delivered while wearing a sombrero as a response to negative commentary about her representation of black and Latino characters, provoked outrage and counterargument. If there had been no sombrero, no wrath at the Whitney Biennial over the inclusion of the white artist Dana Schutz's painting ''Open Casket,'' depicting the murdered Emmett Till in his coffin, no furor over the model Karlie Kloss wearing a Native American headdress while strutting down the Victoria's Secret runway -- events that demanded reckoning and discussion -- perhaps Rumaan Alam and his publisher would not have felt compelled to print a letter with review copies of his new novel delineating the differences between creator and protagonist. Alam tells us that he is an Indian-American man and not a white woman like his main character, but like her he too is an adoptive parent of children of another race. He goes on to observe that ''much of what's in these pages -- breast-feeding a newborn, being visited by a dead woman -- is simply outside my realm of experience,'' and ends with the declaration: ''This book is not the truth. But I hope you'll find it to be true nonetheless.''
It's obviously a tongue-in-cheek disclaimer, but why disclaim at all? This is a work of fiction, a category of writing succinctly defined as invention. Why does a novelist's job -- to make stuff up -- need a pre-emptive defense? Is auto-fiction, like Karl Ove Knausgaard's or the brilliant Rachel Cusk's, now the novelist's only safe bet? And should a letter like Alam's inoculate him from criticism?
Well, no. ''That Kind of Mother'' -- Alam's second novel; his first was the well-received ''Rich and Pretty'' -- is both provocative and vexing. The story spans a dozen or so years, beginning in the 1980s in a wealthy D.C. suburb, where we meet Volvo-driving Rebecca Stone, a young poet married to a British diplomat. Herself both ''rich and pretty,'' Rebecca is terrified of taking care of her infant son. Panicking, she coerces Priscilla, a calming African-American breast-feeding coach, to come home from the hospital with her as a nanny for her baby and paid friend for herself. These are the most successful passages of this somewhat meandering and episodic story, as Priscilla instructs Rebecca on the art of pureeing rather than purchasing fancy baby foods, tends to the baby's many needs as his mother dabbles away at her poems, and most importantly holds Rebecca's hand while teaching her how to mother. Alam shrewdly explores the complexities of caregiving as employment, illuminating issues of class and race that arise when people are paid to do hard, dirty work and, in essence, to provide love. While Rebecca's life is an open book, Priscilla is private -- a dynamic yet contained character whom anyone who's spent time with middle-class American parents and their babysitters will recognize all too well. It's an intimacy that goes one way.
Rebecca's happy idyll ends fairly early in the novel when Priscilla dies in childbirth. With no father in sight, and Priscilla's adult daughter, Cheryl, about to give birth herself, Rebecca decides on the spur of the moment, without informing her husband, Christopher, to take the infant, Andrew, home. She also decides six months later -- again on the spur of the moment, again without consulting Christopher -- that they will adopt this child.
If Rebecca sounds well meaning but self-involved, even myopic, that's because she is: spoiled and entitled, spending her days cooking, composing poems, nurturing her kids, oblivious to costs or consequences and the living world around her -- even the difficulties of marriage and the inevitable dangers of raising a black boy in a white world. Still, she works hard to keep her new extended family -- her husband, sons and Cheryl, her younger boy's biological sister -- close. And she instinctively stands up for her kid when Andrew is stereotyped by a racist teacher.
But mostly Rebecca mothers, and racks up literary accomplishments so easily that her charmed career will set real-life poets' teeth on edge. The book's central issues -- white privilege and transracial adoption -- are lived with but not fully reckoned with, either dramatically or even, for all of Rebecca's optimistic navel gazing, internally. While Alam depicts Rebecca's faults with a natural-born observer's smart and funny gaze and a heightened sense of irony, I wasn't always sure what to make of her.
Except for this: In his letter, Alam, a special projects editor on the Books desk at The Times, states his hope that readers will find this book ''true.'' In Rebecca, he has created a flawed and sometimes irritating character who fully and completely loves her children -- adopted and biological, black and white -- beyond reason, because she is their parent. It is that all-consuming, passionate and annoying parental love that resonates and gives this book its value. It also rings true. In this sense, both the author and the character he searched both inside and outside of himself to create ultimately perform the jobs they were meant to do.
Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter , sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar . And listen to us on the Book Review podcast .
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Schulman, Helen. "Nature vs. Nurture." The New York Times Book Review, 15 July 2018, p. 18(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A546539836/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=479cf851. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
LEAVE THE WORLD BEHINDBy Rumaan Alam
The literary suspense of ''Leave the World Behind'' hinges on that familiar guilt-tinged longing for a vacation that never ends. Rumaan Alam inhabits the head space of Amanda and Clay, denizens of New York City, parents of a teenage son and adolescent daughter, who slouch toward Long Island for summer vacation -- only to discover that life as they know it is over.
There's an Airbnb, far off the GPS-beaten path, ''extraordinary and only $340 a day,'' made all the more alluring by its lack of cellphone access. ''The Ultimate Escape,'' the listing proclaimed before launching into ''chummy advertising-speak'' to describe the place. Clay and Amanda are sold. They pack up the car (''not so new as to be luxurious or so old as to be bohemian'') and head out of town.
Alam's two previous novels, ''Rich and Pretty'' and ''That Kind of Mother,'' have proved he's gifted with an acidic wit, one he uses to break down contemporary life at the cellular level. His wry observations about the structured chaos of vacation life might go on indefinitely -- but then comes a knock at the door. The owners of the rental house arrive, seeking refuge. Clay and Amanda, not anticipating this intrusion or the particular station of their landlords turned guests -- they're Black and wealthy, how could this be? -- castigate themselves for their illiberal reactions. But the real issue is what these newcomers are escaping from: a mysterious blackout in New York City.
We flit, omniscient, through this unlikely collection of minds as the slow trickle of news turns bleak. The adults cling to the cabin, their off-the-grid paradise is now a prison. Think Cormac McCarthy's ''The Road'' if nobody ever got the courage to embark down that titular path. But the children disappear into the encroaching wild -- as children on vacation are wont to do -- and that wild answers back with alarming ferality.
Danger materializes, not from external threats, but from the breakdown of interior constructs. The body itself becomes an unstable environment, a thing we have ruined or wasted, a domain completely out of our control. ''What a marvel to have a body, a thing that contained you,'' Amanda thinks after a dip in the pool. ''Vacation was for being returned to your body.'' All those functions that never seem to exist in fiction -- ''a noisy, wet revolution inside his stomach,'' ''that post-midnight binge pouring out of him in seconds'' -- are on artful display here, an intimacy that is also a challenge. Why are you cringing? Why are you looking away?
[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of October. See the full list . ]
Alam doesn't dwell in the specificity of apocalypse, which has been the obsession of writers since the Flood. Instead he lobs a prescient accusation: Faced with the end of the world, you wouldn't do a damn thing.
Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic we've analyzed all the usual guides to dystopia and found many of them wanting. No zombies here, no lawless wasteland, just the stagnant grief of not-knowing. Terror is the inability to stop forces of nature, to protect the ones you love, to protect even yourself -- in Alam's purview, the flimsy and useless body.
Among Alam's middle-class Manhattanites, comparisons to that trifecta of New York crises abound: Sept. 11, the 2003 blackout,Hurricane Sandy. Comfort comes from the where-were-you-when stories that will someday be all that's left of our current crisis. That Alam anticipates this psychological reflex, that he articulates it with depth and self-flagellation, and that he has been proved so right by the world we're living in now, is what makes his narrative both beautiful and unbearable. Stop cringing. Stop looking away.
For all this, Alam's early tragicomedy-of-manners approach to race falters. The arrival of the Black, genteel older couple creates, as the narrative bruisingly points out, an opportunity to play Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Their interiority never arrives: ''It was hard not to assume the role of genial sitcom neighbor. Television created the context, and Black people had to play along.'' Self-consciously, Alam sticks with whom he seems most comfortable: the NPR-listening, Carroll Gardens-dwelling, New York Times-reading every-person.
Still, if the first half can turn a mirror on you, the second half will shatter it. ''Leave the World Behind'' teeters on that seesaw-edge question in horror fiction: to reveal the monster or not? Ultimately it totters too far to one side, but there is still the primal nail-biting need to know what-the-hell-is-going-on. This propulsion, which drives much of the characters' decisions, likewise drives the reader onward to a breathless conclusion that, if not altogether satisfying, is undeniably haunting.
Afia Atakora is the author of ''Conjure Women.'' LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND By Rumaan Alam 256 pp. Ecco. $27.99.
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Gaurab Thakali FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Atakora, Afia. "Private Property." The New York Times Book Review, 25 Oct. 2020, p. 12(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A639356142/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a3bb57b6. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY
In a time of global pandemic, racial justice uprising, and widespread economic hardship, Rumaan Alam's third novel, "Leave the World Behind" (Ecco, 256 pp., ****), may be the best thing you can read about one of the worst things you can imagine. A perfectly-engineered thrill ride that is also a novel of ideas, "Leave the World Behind" combines deft prose, a pitiless view of consumer culture and a few truly shocking moments.
Brooklynites Amanda and Clay have driven to the Long Island Airbnb they can almost afford for a summer week where they hope to let go of work and money stress - he's a professor; she's an account director - and enjoy the borrowed ease that comes from visiting wealth: central air conditioning, wide-plank floors, gray marble kitchen counters, and a lush pool their kids (Archie, 15, and Rose, a bit younger) plunge into right away.
But when the owners of the house, G.H. and Ruth, arrive unexpectedly one night with a story of a citywide blackout and a request to stay, the four adults are in uneasy waters. G.H. and Ruth are Black and affluent; Clay and Amanda are middle-class and white. Disparities in race and social status drive a tense undercurrent beneath their mostly polite but strained interactions.
What begins as sharp commentary on social milieu widens into something less definitive, more interesting. Interrupting the narration are blinding flash-forwards that seem to come from a larger awareness than any of the characters could possess, and these brief glimpses read like surreal nightmares in miniature: a man fatally trapped in a subway, an illness growing inside someone, a mass migration of deer.
Alam's novel pushes at the confines of the form, asking readers to veer away from the central story to consider other lives, other experiences. One of the panicky sorrows of the frantic crisis portrayed in "Leave the World Behind" is the realization that we need others, and that we will reject others in their hour of need.
This is brought home powerfully in an understated but brutal scene when G.H. mistakes his boss-worker relationship with a local handyman for friendship, an alliance. Or when one of the parents has this thought: "It was a hell of a thing to not be able to keep your kid safe. Was this how everyone felt? Was this, finally, what it was to be a human?"
It is a tribute to Alam's skill that the existential horror of such questions doesn't just intensify his characters' white-knuckle situation, but truly deepens the novel as a whole, making truths that are difficult and clear-eyed.
"Leave the World Behind" is an exceptional read that will stay with you long after you've sped through its final pages.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Tedrowe, Emily Gray. "Alam's 'World' is scary, timely." USA Today, 6 Oct. 2020, p. 05B. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A637575325/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c1a94769. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
Byline: Porter Shreve
Leave the World Behind
By Rumaan Alam
Ecco. 256 pp. $27.99
- - -
If you missed out on traveling this summer to that Airbnb with the swimming pool and the wide-plank floors, the gray marble kitchen island and the invitation to "step into our beautiful house and leave the world behind," Rumaan Alam's third novel makes for a wonderful escape - at first. The family at the heart of "Leave the World Behind" has left its cramped Brooklyn apartment for a week of relaxation in a remote corner of Long Island to celebrate a promotion for the mother, Amanda, at her advertising firm. The father, Clay, a professor of media studies at City College, is wrapping up a book review but otherwise ready to make the most of the last days before fall semester. And their kids, Archie and Rose, have the usual concerns of 15- and 13-year-olds: video games, social media, their changing bodies. They're thrilled about the swimming pool, not so much about the lack of cell service.
The initial days unfold at a vacation's leisurely pace, without much happening but with plenty of wit and trenchant observation. Alam's work is Cheever-like in the examination of New York privilege, the assured vitality of the prose and, we'll come to find, the dark, surreal vision: "The house had that hush expensive houses do. Silence meant the house was plumb, solid, its organs working in happy harmony. The respiration of the central air-conditioning, the vigilance of the expensive fridge, the reliable intelligence of all those digital displays marking the time in almost-synchronicity. At a preprogrammed hour, the exterior lights would turn on. A house that barely needed people."
Suddenly into that orderly silence a loud noise erupts, the first of several that will puncture this holiday and throw everyone's lives off-kilter. It's a knock on the door late at night. On the other side: a Black couple. Older. Well-heeled. They say they're the owners of this house. They were at the symphony in the Bronx, they say, but a blackout has swept across much of the East Coast. Afraid of the chaos they might find in the city, not wanting to climb 14 floors in darkness to their apartment on the Upper East Side, they've come, unannounced, apologetically, to their second home, where at least for the time being the power is still on. They want to stay here, in the in-law suite in the basement, until the trouble has passed.
This premise alone could make an entire book, as it does films and plays like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "Six Degrees of Separation," which take on race and the appearance of Black strangers at the doors of White families. And for many chapters Alam explores every facet of this situation, exposing the fear and distrust and outright racism of Clay and Amanda, who feel that this is their house, their site of leisure. And the more they assert themselves, the more the house becomes a metaphor for the country, a battleground over right of ownership. When Amanda thinks, "those people didn't look like the sort to own such a beautiful house," she reveals a glimpse of white supremacy beneath the neoliberal mask of racial tolerance.
The owner's wife, Ruth, worked for years at the most exclusive private school in the city. The owner has made his money in private equity. He goes by the initials G.H., but his name by birth is George Washington. Father of the country. Landowner. Enslaver. The clever ironies and turns on the property metaphor are matched only by the twists in the plot to come. A book that begins as a novel of class and then comes to encompass race by the middle transforms again into a waking nightmare. People wander off. Strange animals appear in the yard. Terrifying noises resound. The streets empty of visible life. An eerie silence falls over the land. And the narrator, who has moved deftly from character to character, investing us fully in the lives of all six occupants of the Airbnb, expands our viewpoint outward, to the woods, to the city, to the planet. And the news is not good.
"Leave the World Behind" is the perfect title for a book that opens with the promise of utopia and travels as far from that dream as our worst fears might take us. It is the rarest of books: a genuine thriller, a brilliant distillation of our anxious age, and a work of high literary merit that deserves a place among the classics of dystopian literature.
- - -
Shreve is the author of four novels. He directs the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Shreve, Porter. "Book World: Rumaan Alam's 'Leave the World Behind' is a brilliant, suspenseful examination of race and class." Washington Post, 5 Oct. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A637495830/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0682d788. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND
RUMAAN ALAM
256pp. Bloomsbury. 14.99 [pounds sterling].
THE ARREST
JONATHAN LETHEM
320pp. Atlantic. 14.99 [pounds sterling].
When it comes--gradually, then suddenly, like bankruptcy--the apocalypse will be humiliating. Long after civilization has mouldered away, social discomfort will likely overstay its welcome.
In Rumaan Alam's excellent apocalyptic novel Leave the World Behind, a middle-class family leaves Brooklyn for a remote Long Island Airbnb. At the wheel--somehow passively, which is how he does everything--is Clay, a second-rate professor at a second-rate college. Amanda is an advertising executive who craves inflated titles and the adulation of her colleagues. The kids they don't seem crazy about are in the back of the car--a vehicle neither old nor new enough to be cool. Addicted to cigarettes and screens, this family seems particularly ill-suited--as well as oblivious--to the vague meltdown unfolding around them.
Just a few hours into their holiday, Ruth and George, the cottage's owners, turn up and ask for shelter in their own house. They couldn't possibly stay at their New York apartment: the city is in a blackout. Maybe the entire the East Coast. The nation? The West? The scale and specifics of what is happening are never made clear, but the flamingos and deer seem to know the score. Even the reassuringly macho neighbour and his second wife are spooked. Something geopolitical and punitive is being rained down--possibly from fighter jets cracking plate glass, loosening teeth and making wildlife stampede. Iran is mentioned, as well as North Korea and China. But so are rising sea levels. And Mike Pence.
The two couples and two children hunker down in the gilded cage that they have complicated rights to be in, cut off from the world. A smug and knowing narrator throws us a few gloomy bones--commuters suffocating in an elevator; a Midwestern mother drowning her children in the bathtub--but otherwise we are confined to the upstate, upscale rental house and its strange bedfellows. It works. The physical containment and convincing dialogue bring to mind a memorable stage play. And rather than employing the blunt instruments of apocalyptic cliche (terror, cruelty, resilience, even love), Alam mines, with disarming plausibility, the brittle rules of contemporary bourgeois society. How catastrophic does it have to be before we stop getting drunk on holiday, pricking up our ears when we hear that a fellow survivor runs admissions at an exclusive school, or cringing when a white character tells an older Black man that he looks like Denzel Washington?
The finance veteran George makes everything about his beloved "market". Clay and Amanda make everything about anything but race: they are white, Ruth and George are Black. In spite of George's obsession with hoarding tubs of pasta in the annexe, they are not a practical foursome, and the house becomes a sort of Yaddo for bullshit jobs. Clay in particular becomes a comic figure in his urban incompetence. Told to get a bat to deal with a possible intruder, he pictures "the flying mammal". Driving past crops, he wonders idly whether they're soybeans, and whether soybeans are the same as edamame. He gets lost looking for Coca-Cola and cigarettes.
In Jonathan Lethem's The Arrest, 500 miles up the coast and probably a few years later, an intentional community of neo-back-to-the-landers is trying not to act too smug. They have been practising off-grid hipster homesteading since before it was necessary, and now that a mystical event--"the arrest"--has knocked out every machine on the landmass, things are still peachy on this idyllic Maine peninsula.
Like Alam, Lethem has little interest in the technical exposition of what went wrong. His preoccupation is with the social fallout that follows. And with a similarly hermetic approach to Alam's, his diesel punk semi-satire takes place on this New England commune, with the odd flashback to pre-arrest Los Angeles. When life gives you lemons, the motto up here goes, make lemon curd.
Sandy is struggling, though. His cool nickname--"Journeyman"--isn't catching on, and he isn't at home among the horny hands of toil. Before the arrest he was a city guy--an LA guy in fact: a Hollywood hack who happened to be here on holiday when everything fell apart, like Clay and Amanda. Now he is a spare wheel on this peninsula of pickle-makers and duck-curers, and his Tinseltown currency doesn't go far. He is a lousy mushroom forager. He called the farming collective members "interns"--just one time, but his sister won't let him forget it. Unable to bottle fiddleheads or grow cannabis, he is relegated to delivering groceries to the town sex offender, using his Telluride Film Festival backpack and the bicycle he can't fix himself. He wasn't great shakes in Hollywood either: a "writer's non-writer" brought into redraft projects going nowhere, he only made it by flying on the coattails of his obnoxious Yale roommate Peter Todbaum, now a features film impresario.
Then Todbaum arrives in Maine, driving a limitededition nuclear-powered digger, something a billionaire might doodle during an end-of-days seminar for the offensively rich. If Todbaum was poorly adjusted before, months confined to his "artisanal panzer" boring his away across America with only his reactor-powered espresso machine for company haven't prepared him for the neo-luddites and their granola.
Lethem has fun with his fish-out-of-water farce, spinning it in odd directions. The kibbutz's cobbler has so many problems that the town shrink is drowning in shoes. Then again, the pre-barter economy hardly made sense either, reliant on live lobsters being airlifted to Paris and sea anemones to Japan, where they were snapped up as a hedge against impotence.
Behind the rebuke about our technological over-reliance, Lethem and Alam have a more subtle, and important, message: that American armageddon won't be the great social leveller. They may be bumbling and inept, but the Clays and Sandys can still expect a pretty cushy apocalypse, the tenured professor holed up with a fund manager and his wine, the screenwriter kept in foie gras in exchange for bicycling duties. They'd call it luck--being in the right place at the right time--but they've probably been saying that all their lives.
Caption: Jakob Hofmann lives in New Orleans, Louisiana
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hofmann, Jakob. "American carnage: Tales of post-apocalyptic calamity, social awkwardness and espresso." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6142-6143, 18 Dec. 2020, p. 26. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A646562795/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8dd65524. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
Katz, Josh. On the Roof: New York in Quarantine. Thames & Hudson. Nov. 2021. 144p. ISBN 9780500024911. $24.95. PHOTOG
When quarantine was imposed on his hometown in March 2020, Katz, a New York City-based photographer of urban street life, climbed up to his rooftop, escaping the isolation of his apartment. The height afforded Katz the perfect vantage to observe the emerging socially distanced "rooftop culture" of those weeks and months. Katz photographed neighbors sunbathing, reading, playing music, dining, dancing, keeping pigeons, celebrating birthdays, even skateboarding. This title gathers more than 100 images taken during this time. Katz's lively, insightful diaristic essays discuss topics personal and professional (the complexities of dating in quarantine, meeting neighbors across roofs, the ethics of this unusual approach to photography, and more). A lovely foreword by novelist Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) considers city life as collective endeavor and as a joyful claiming of space. VERDICT A unique view of a city coping with the reality of COVID-19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"On the Roof: New York in Quarantine." Library Journal, vol. 146, no. 11, Nov. 2021, pp. 88+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A684818970/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=917f8c02. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
Howland, Bette THINGS TO COME AND GO A Public Space Books (Fiction None) $16.95 5, 10 ISBN: 978-0-9982675-6-2
Three novellas worth resurrecting.
In recent years, A Public Space Books has reintroduced the works of the undeservedly overlooked Howland (1937-2017), publishing a collection of her stories, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, and W-3, a 1974 memoir of her time in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. Now the imprint has republished, with a new introduction by author Rumaan Alam, this slim volume of three novellas, which Howland originally released in 1983--the year before she won a MacArthur Fellowship and then, presumably overcome by the pressure of heightened expectations, stopped publishing. This is another unburied treasure, with Howland's glimmering talent again on full display. Each story showcases the author's intelligence, insightfulness, and incomparable eye for illuminating detail and ear for captivating dialogue as well as her ability to evoke a specific place and time (often gritty midcentury Chicago and its environs) and the emotional complexities of close relationships (family and otherwise). In Birds of a Feather, Howland's young female narrator quietly comes of age amid the cacophony and oblique warmth of her father's loud Jewish family, "the big brassy yak-yakking Abarbanels." The Old Wheeze focuses on the events of a single snowy Chicago night following a divorced young mother's date with an admired older man and captures the differing perspectives of the mother, her elderly babysitter, her nursery-school-age son, and her lover. In the third and final novella, The Life You Gave Me, a daughter reckons with her complicated relationship with her father as she is summoned to the hospital to visit him on two separate occasions. "My father's size and strength were more than physical. Mental, temperamental. Character traits. Mind Over Matter was his motto .To see him brought down, laid low, damaged, hurting, like any other injured creature--was to see him disgraced," Howland writes. "All of which is not to say that my father was ever a simple man. Only that he didn't know his own strength. But I did." Howland, too, may not have understood the strength of her own writing. But now, thanks to the reissuing of these and other stories, we do.
This rediscovered collection feels as clear and colorful as if it had been written today.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Howland, Bette: THINGS TO COME AND GO." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A701896720/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=460e5138. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
With the republication of ''The Children's Bach,'' a 1984 novel, and ''This House of Grief,'' a 2014 account of a murder trial, the Australian writer Helen Garner is ripe for discovery by American readers.
THE CHILDREN'S BACH, by Helen Garner
THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF: The Story of a Murder Trial, by Helen Garner
I had never heard of the Australian writer Helen Garner when I started reading her novel ''The Children's Bach,'' and the book puzzled me at first, before I got into the scatty, nonlinear rhythm of its prose. We are immediately introduced to a cluster of characters: Dexter; his wife, Athena; their two little boys, one of them developmentally disabled; the adult sisters Elizabeth and Vicki; Elizabeth's lover Philip and his adolescent daughter, Poppy. How, I wondered, were the characters connected to one another, and why did Garner's sentences seem to float through the air like random thoughts?
I felt I had walked into a room where little was coming into focus, until, quite suddenly, it did. Garner's style is laconic and wayward, reminding me of other writers whose gift is the art of artlessness, like Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles and Paula Fox. Nothing is put forward to entice the reader to take an interest in what is taking place on the page -- no dramatic events or abrupt plunges into emotion. Everything is a manifestation of Garner's sensibility rather than a plot point, which can make for a certain opaqueness regarding her character's motives. Yet ''The Children's Bach'' seemed truer to the way we experience life than most other novels I'd read.
Now 80, Garner is one of those versatile writers who can move from genre to genre -- fiction to nonfiction, including true crime, screenplays and diaries. ''The Children's Bach'' was first published in 1984 and is now being reissued with a foreword by the novelist Rumaan Alam, who allows that, though he has recommended the book to several people, ''I rarely describe what it's about. ... In a sense, the novel has no main character, and is less about a single person than a single period of time. Things happen, which I won't spoil, so my synopsis boils down to this: This is a story about how life happens to all of us.''
''The Children's Bach'' is set in suburban Melbourne in the early 1980s; there is an atmosphere of casualness, almost lassitude, about its characters, who drift in and out of one another's existence with an ease that seems both alluring and dangerous. Dexter, the anchor of the group, and also its most astute observer, is a contented husband and father; he is the sort of porous, cultured person who reacts badly to ''awful modern clothes'' and ''spiked'' hair, sticks a photo of Tennyson with his wife and two sons on the kitchen wall (''Tennyson's hands are large square paws, held up awkwardly at stomach level''), and breaks into an aria from ''Don Giovanni'' when he is out walking with Athena.
When Elizabeth, a once close friend of Dexter's from college, bumps into him at the airport, where she is meeting her younger sister, Vicki, both of them aimless and given to a kind of unconscious destructiveness, Dexter's family begins to lose its footing. Vicki attaches herself to the pacific Athena with an eye toward arranging her own life along the lines of Athena's ordinary routines -- ironing, preparing food and practicing Bach's ''Little Preludes'' at a piano in the kitchen.
Elizabeth, elegant and regal, has long been intermittently involved with Philip, a rock musician who dabbles in casual sex and drugs, and occasionally attends to his self-sufficient, seemingly motherless daughter, Poppy, while also pursuing a fling with Athena. ''This hotel is a dump,'' he says of the place he checks into with Athena, after she has left the safety and comfort of her life with Dexter for Philip's glamorous detachment. ''I love it.''
Elizabeth, who seems cynical beyond her almost 40 years, looks on wearily, seemingly unperturbed by Philip's latest dalliance: ''He's always looking for new blood. Something new. A little thrill for that amusement park he calls his mind.'' Athena, protected and naïve, imagines that Philip might lead her to the sort of adventurous life that she and Dexter have intentionally not chosen: ''Perhaps there was a world where people could act on whims, where deeds could detach themselves clearly from all notion of consequences. Perhaps this never-quite-present Philip might be that mythical creature, a man who was utterly scrupulous and who was yet prepared to do anything. Perhaps she too might never apologize, never explain.''
By the end of ''The Children's Bach,'' havoc has been wrought, and even the roving-eyed Philip has caught a glimpse of the void that lies beneath his antic, restless connections: ''I will grow old and die, he thought, without moral consolation.'' But the final note belongs to Dexter, who believes in rules and the fleeting possibility of beauty. Athena goes back to him and the house ''fuggy with the smell of children.'' She opens windows and doors, puts the trash in the incinerator and the sheets into the washing machine, scrubs and mops, and empties the fridge. Order, fragile but real, is restored: ''Someone will put the kettle on'' and Athena will return to practicing Bach.
Garner ventures into wholly different territory with ''This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial.'' Originally published in 2014, it was compared to Truman Capote's ''In Cold Blood'' and helped earn her a prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize two years later. The book follows the 2007 murder trial of Robert Farquharson, whose three sons drowned after his car swerved off the highway close to their home not far from Melbourne and plunged into a dam. Farquharson, embittered by a recent separation from a wife who not only got to keep the newer of their two cars but rapidly found a new man, insisted that he had blacked out at the wheel after a coughing fit and that his sons' deaths were tragic accidents. ''The coughing fit story,'' Garner observes early in her account, ''provoked incredulity and scorn. The general feeling was that a man like Farquharson could not tolerate the loss of control he experienced when his wife ended the marriage.''
Much of the book revolves around the disputatious inquiry that constitutes a courtroom trial, the back-and-forth between the prosecutor and the defense lawyers, the questioning and cross-examination of witnesses for both sides. This part is gripping, as we watch Farquharson, a window-washer at a resort -- who reminded me of the hapless Charles Bovary, unlucky in love and life -- come into focus as a passive, well-meaning man and devoted father (''a softie,'' his ex-wife calls him).
He may have been driven by rage and vindictiveness to do the unthinkable -- on Father's Day, no less. He sits ''in a glaring white shirt with a stiff collar and tie,'' hunched and humiliated in the dock, frequently sobbing and scrubbing at his face with a handkerchief. He is a person Garner alternately pities and condemns but never condescends to.
Farquharson's former wife, Cindy Gambino, who originally backs up his story, is a figure of dignity, grief-stricken by what has occurred but also not one to embellish or deny the facts that led up to her ex-husband's actions. She admits to his being ''a very good provider'' but also that she was not in love with him and eventually asked him to leave. ''He went to live with his dad,'' she explains. ''He was devastated. It was a case of you don't know what you've got till it's gone.'' She is clearly the smarter and more ambitious of the two, and the couple emerge as a mismatch from the start, one with fatal consequences.
There is also a certain amount of tedium that is part of any trial, especially when it involves granular details, such as which way the car swerved, the exact placement of the tire tracks and whether the front passenger door was opened underwater by one of Farquharson's sons. Garner is good at capturing it all, the longueurs as well as the suspense: ''As the hours and days ground on, the air in the court became a jelly of confusion and boredom. The judge took off his spectacles and violently rubbed his eyes. Journalists sucked lollies to stay awake. Jurors' mouths went square with the effort to control their gaping yawns. Their heads swayed, or dropped forward on to their chests.''
Garner brings to the tragic accommodation Farquharson has made with the disappointments and failures of his life her curiosity and empathy, along with a rigorous regard for the truth. Toward the end of the book, after having listened closely to the ''mighty barrages of fanatical detail'' and having been ''battered by the apparatus of so-called reason,'' she still wavers on the issue of Farquharson's guilt, stirred by the painful gray aspects of a situation that keeps being painted, the better to come to a verdict, in black and white. ''What was the point?'' she wonders. ''What was the truth? Whatever it was, it seemed to reside in some far-off, shadowy realm of anguish, beyond the reach of words and resistant to the striving of the intellect.''
Helen Garner is a prodigiously gifted writer, one with many quivers in her bow. ''This House of Grief'' is the sort of book Joan Didion might have written if she'd had more of a heart, while ''The Children's Bach'' achieves a cumulative effect that leaves a lasting impression. Another novel by Garner is scheduled to be republished next year, which is cause for celebration. It's high time American readers knew her generous, category-defying imagination.
Daphne Merkin's most recent book is the novel ''22 Minutes of Unconditional Love.'' She is currently at work on a memoir about psychoanalysis.
THE CHILDREN'S BACH | By Helen Garner | 160 pp. | Pantheon | $25
THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF: The Story of a Murder Trial | By Helen Garner | 300 pp. | Pantheon | $27
Daphne Merkin's most recent book is the novel ''22 Minutes of Unconditional Love.'' She is currently at work on a memoir about psychoanalysis.
CAPTION(S):
This article appeared in print on page BR12, BR13.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Merkin, Daphne. "Disorder Down Under." The New York Times Book Review, 19 Nov. 2023, p. 12. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A773315248/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3102b52e. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
Garner, Helen THE CHILDREN'S BACH Pantheon (Fiction None) $25.00 10, 10 ISBN: 9780553387414
In late-1970s suburban Melbourne, a cluster of family and friends is disrupted by shifting allegiances.
This new edition of the short 1984 novel many consider the eminent Australian author's masterpiece has a foreword by Rumaan Alam in which he admits to having a hard time encapsulating its virtues. In the end, he cedes the mic to Garner herself, quoting from her diary: "The best I can do is to write books that are small but oblique enough to stick in people's gullets so that they remember them." This small, oblique, and gullet-sticking book circles around a group of nine people: Dexter and Athena Fox; their children, Billy, who has a developmental disability, and Arthur; Dexter's long-ago ex Elizabeth, who in the wake of her mother's death has been joined by her teenage sister, Vicki; Elizabeth's sort-of boyfriend, a rocker named Philip; and Philip's daughter, Poppy. In brief scenes, the perspective of the novel flits around the group from one shoulder to the next, often not making it immediately clear which characters are involved. This elusiveness inspires careful reading and works to closely focus attention on the key issue of how each character understands and misunderstands the others. For example: "Athena's life was mysterious to Vicki. She seemed contained, without needs, never restless." Young Vicki is going to be quite surprised when Athena's needs and restlessness drive her to an action that affects everyone in the group. Garner gives a master class in her own technique with some advice musician Philip offers an aspiring songwriter: "Take out the clichés....Just leave in the images. Know what I mean? You have to steer a line between what you understand and what you don't. Between cliché and the other thing. Make gaps. Don't chew on it. Don't explain everything. Leave holes. The music will do the rest." There are continual references to music in this book, but it's the music of the prose and the hyperlucid imagery that "do the rest" here. One small example--as Athena and Elizabeth's friendship becomes ever more complicated due to shifting relationships with men, the two of them collaborate to fold a sheet coming off the clothesline, passing it by the corners, one relinquishing, one accepting, as "the light left the garden."
Brilliantly constructed and puzzling in a good way, the way that even our own lives can be puzzling to us.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Garner, Helen: THE CHILDREN'S BACH." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A758849134/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4473ae34. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
To listen to this broadcast, click here:
Play Audio
HOST: SCOTT SIMON
SCOTT SIMON: The megarich, a character in Rumaan Alam's new novel declares, wreak havoc on the environment and refuse to pay fair taxes. Then they get to decide what's a worthy cause, bless the rest of us with some of their leftover money.
"Entitlement" centers on Brooke, a former teacher who goes to work for an 83-year-old billionaire to help him decide how to give away his fortune. Brooke begins to try to create her own position in a world she travels without always feeling a part of it. Rumaan Alam, whose "Leave The World Behind" was a 2020 National Book Award finalist, joins us now from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
RUMAAN ALAM: Thank you for having me.
SIMON: Please tell us about Brooke, and where she is in her life when she takes this job with the billionaire Asher Jaffee.
ALAM: Brooke is a 33-year-old woman. In the modern world, that sort of counts as young. She's on the precipice of real adulthood, and she's sort of in search of who she really is. She finds this job working for Asher Jaffee, a billionaire who intends to give away his fortune, and she thinks that that work may provide her a sense of self.
SIMON: Yeah. All the worthy people and causes the foundation might give money to - appeals come rolling in. Could I ask you to read one from your novel?
ALAM: Absolutely.
(Reading) Brooke would not have guessed that there were people with an enthusiasm bordering on mania for the humble oyster. The group's fervor was persuasive. The aim was to repatriate the oyster to New York Harbor. This would clean the waterways. This would repair a broken food chain. Beavers would return. You couldn't be alive in 2014 and not know that the Earth was broken, but it was exhilarating to learn that it could be healed. What was needed was time, and oysters - and millions of dollars.
SIMON: And tell us about Asher Jaffee, because as billionaires go, he seems to wear his heart on his sleeve, doesn't he?
ALAM: It was my interest in making Asher different than, maybe, the idea of the nefarious billionaire. He made his fortune selling office supplies, which is quite different from being a defense contractor. He is what we call a self-made man, although I'm not really sure that it's possible for anyone to be self-made.
SIMON: Yeah.
ALAM: And he's very likable, and he enjoys the great fortune that he's amassed. I wanted him to feel as seductive to the reader as he proves to be for Brooke.
SIMON: And he wants to do some good, right?
ALAM: I do think that Asher's motive is sincere. He says, at one point, he wants to do it all. He wants to ban the bomb. He wants to save the whales. He wants to make sure every child in America knows how to read. He cares about these things, and I care about those things, too, and so it was a pleasure to conjure somebody with the kind of political ideals that I share.
SIMON: Yeah. I want you to talk about an extraordinary scene, where Asher casually takes Brooke to see a work of art at an auction house.
ALAM: Asher has gone on this errand to buy a present for his wife for her birthday, and they go into a room and look at a painting by Helen Frankenthaler. And Asher, for all of his fortune, all of his sophistication, feels that this sort of abstract painting is a test, is a referendum on his own sophistication, on his own intellect. Brooke has a different kind of experience in which she really sees something in this painting. She sees something sort of soulful and spiritual, and that is something that Asher, for all of his money, somehow cannot quite possess.
SIMON: Does her work begin to affect Brooke's plans in life and, if I might put it this way, her objects of desire?
ALAM: Brooke's proximity to wealth on the scale that belongs to Asher Jaffee distorts her sense of who she is and, with it, everything else - her sense of personal priority, her sense of professional ambition, her sense of ethics and morals. And that is really what the book is asking us, I think, is, what effect does money have on us? And you don't have to have billions of dollars to acknowledge that money has had an effect on your own life, on the shape of your life and, in fact, on your day-to-day interactions.
SIMON: Somebody told me years ago, in fact, when I was in our New York bureau, that every New York story is ultimately about real estate.
ALAM: (Laughter).
SIMON: Is that true here, too?
ALAM: Real estate is at the heart of the foundational American myth. Even the notion of America's westward expansion in some way seems to be about real estate, about a desire to acquire space. Brooke is part of a generation who are now adults, I should point out, for whom that prospect feels more mythic than ever because of the way the economy functions right now. Is homeownership really within reach of people in their 30s and 40s? I'm not sure I know the answer to that.
SIMON: You and your husband have a couple of sons. Some people complain about young children interfering with their work. I gather you see your children as spurs to your work.
ALAM: I do think there is a way of thinking about creative life and private family life as at odds with one another. And I think that is a myth, as well, and I think it's one that's often propagated by men. My children have been such a source of joy and profound happiness for me and have taken me outside of myself in a way that really suited my work. And I found that after I had children, everything that was unimportant to me fell away. What remained was my children, but also my work. It showed me how to prioritize, and I'm really grateful to them for that.
SIMON: I forget what author who said something to the effect, the death of creativity is the pram in the hallway.
ALAM: Right. That's exactly it. That distills it perfectly. I have a sense that that was said by a man who probably wasn't out pushing the...
SIMON: Pushing the pram (laughter).
ALAM: In my household, my husband and I have both taken our turns pushing the stroller and now, you know, accompanying our son to hockey practice or whatever. I choose not to see that as an impediment to what I want to accomplish professionally. I prefer to acknowledge it as really enriching something in me.
SIMON: Do you see this country, and maybe even much of this world, as in a kind of new Gilded Age now?
ALAM: I think that I am hardly alone in drawing that particular parallel. We are in a moment where the billionaire as a figure is a celebrity and where we can see all around us the ramifications of this particular stratification of wage in this country. And I do think that we are in a moment of reckoning with that, especially as a generation behind me heads into maturity. The system, I think, cannot persist.
SIMON: Do you think it's important for novelists to write about this these days?
ALAM: I wouldn't want to prescribe what it is novelists should be tackling, but I would say that the political is inescapable. It's part of the air we all breathe. And if you're writing about real life, if you're writing about family life, if you're writing about nature - whatever it is, it's going to have an element of the political inside of it.
SIMON: Rumaan Alam, his new novel, "Entitlement." Thank you so much for being with us.
ALAM: Thank you very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAURENT DURY AND SEBASTIEN GISBERT'S "EARTH ATMOSPHERE")
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=7
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"A billionaire gives away his fortune in Rumaan Alam's 'Entitlement'." Weekend Edition Saturday, 14 Sept. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808676322/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7548eee9. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
Byline: Elizabeth Hand
âThere's a lot of secret money,â writer Rumaan Alam said in a recent Guardian interview. He refers to âthese secret layers of money and pedigree informing other people's lives. And once you've realized that, it can make you crazy with envy, or frustration.â âEntitlement,â Alam's bleakly satirical, unnerving new novel, shows the devastating impact of that realization on a young New York City woman whose life is derailed by her proximity to a fortune âas mind-boggling as the stars.â
Alam's previous novel, âLeave the World Behindâ (2020), gave readers a glimpse of an indeterminate apocalypse and its impact on two affluent families in the Hamptons, one Black, the other White. A similar sense of dread infuses âEntitlement,â with its steady poisonous drip of racism, generational wealth, classism and real estate envy.
Brooke Orr, the book's protagonist, is the adopted Black daughter of a well-off, White single mother who runs an organization devoted to reproductive health. Growing up in an affluent liberal bubble in Manhattan, Brooke attended private school and clung to her biracial âalmost cousinâ and best friend, Kim. Both Brooke and Kim went to Vassar, where they befriended Matthew - âa cliché, two girls and their gay best palâ - and gamed out the best places where âtwo and a half Black people could congregate unmolested.â
Now it's 2014. Brooke and her pals are 33 and living in New York. Alam perfectly nails the fleeting optimism of the era; at one point, Brooke pulls out her phone to scan the news, and the headlines are all anodyne - âthe good luck of a boring moment in the world's long history, Obama's placid America.â Brooke has recently left the Bronx charter school where she taught art for nine years and taken a vaguely defined position at the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, run by a billionaire and his wife. She sees her new job not just as a big step up from teaching, but as a chance to do some serious good.
Asher Jaffee had âmade a fortune by diversification,â the narrator explains, and âhe would give that fortune away by the same logic. The environment, education, health, the arts, civic engagement, a better society by every measure.â
Brooke's mother sniffs that her daughter is âa secretary to some zillionaire.â But Brooke is exhilarated to be even a small part of such a virtuous endeavor. âLet this be her purpose. Let her, unnoticed, make the world a better place. Because that was what they were doing, right?â
Yet resentment simmers beneath Brooke's altruism, especially after Kim inherits a fortune from her long-dead father. Kim, beautiful and now fabulously wealthy, leaves the Brooklyn two-bedroom she and Matthew shared for a decade (another unspoken source of tension for Brooke) and buys a $2 million apartment in the West Village.
âI'm expecting you to be here all the time,â Kim assures her friends. âLike every weekend. Whenever.â All three of them know that won't happen.
Alam gives a shout-out to Sylvia Plath's âThe Bell Jarâ in his novel's first line: âIt was a strange, sultry summer, the summer of the Subway Pricker,â who jabs women passengers with a hypodermic then flees. Very soon, envy lances Brooke like the assailant's needle. She tells herself âshe didn't want much more than she had,â but the fact of Kim's inherited wealth gnaws at her like a subway rat. Surely, it's an injustice that Kim now possesses what Brooke believes is âdeeper, more profoundâ than the American Dream, âa place in the world that was yours alone, that reflected who you were and what you were worth.â
Brooke knows that everything in New York City is both transactional and performative, especially for a young Black woman. Declaring herself to be Jaffee's protégé, she quickly captivates the old man, whose only daughter died when she was not much older than Brooke. She accompanies him to drinks, dinners at Jean-Georges, an evening at Lincoln Center, a private tour of his Manhattan penthouse pied-à-terre, with its Monet and glass wall overlooking Central Park. She even advises him to spend almost a million dollars on a Helen Frankenthaler painting, a surprise birthday gift for his wife.
âThis woman, Brooke, Black, gorgeous, serious, passionate, was the sort of woman he wanted at the foundation,â Jaffee thinks, âthe sort of woman he wanted working in his name. It was electric, almost chemical.â
Early on, Brooke grasps that money is Arthur Jaffee's language. Spending time with him, she believes she's learning to speak that language fluently, that she lives in the same world he inhabits. She doesn't grasp that she's merely an economy-class visitor in hostile territory, and her sudden mania - sparked by a desperate drive for a home of her own - could be her undoing. Yet while Alam captures that obsession, Brooke seems oddly unformed for 33. She shows little curiosity about cultural events in a city teeming with them, and exhibits few emotional or romantic interests, other than an encounter with a hot bartender. This can make the nonstop discussions of money, power and real estate feel more polemical than character-driven.
âEntitlement'sâ final chapters move as propulsively as a thriller, but they can be hard to read. Why hasn't anyone noticed that this gifted young woman is in the throes of a terrifying mental health crisis? Yet unhinged and self-absorbed as she is, Brooke still commands the reader's sympathy and compassion. âYou needed a home to be a person,â Alam writes, âand the world had conspired to make some believe that this was, perhaps, too much to ask.â
- - -
Elizabeth Hand's most recent novel is âA Haunting on the Hill.â
- - -
Entitlement
By Rumaan Alam
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Hand, Elizabeth. "In Rumaan Alam's âEntitlement,' money can drive people crazy." Washington Post, 16 Sept. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808847290/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c61894d6. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
In Rumaan Alam's new novel, "Entitlement," giving away a fortune isn't as easy as it sounds.
ENTITLEMENT, by Rumaan Alam
Rumaan Alam is a rarity: a male novelist who specializes in female viewpoints. The viewpoints in question are themselves specialized. They focus on the bourgeois adventures of New York City up-and-comers, adventures in which universal quests - for family, for a home, for material security, for social standing - are intensified and glamorized by the dramatic particulars of life in the big city. The intensity and the glamour come down, in the end, to money. To survive and thrive in New York, you usually need a lot of it.
This reality is not lost on Brooke Orr, the protagonist of "Entitlement." The 33-year-old Black adopted daughter of a white single mother, Brooke is the beneficiary of a privileged, hyper-liberal background involving a Vassar education, a lawyer parent who runs an organization for reproductive justice, and a supportive, vividly multiracial entourage of prosperous college buddies and well-connected solicitous family friends. The diversity and social capital of this cast of characters are not gratuitous. Their significance, we come to realize, is that even a well-off, well-meaning and well-dressed upbringing are no defense against Mammon's enchanting, debasing influence.
Enter Asher Jaffee, an octogenarian self-made billionaire whose almost inconceivable net worth has been amassed through successive careers in "paper. Then catalogs. Then malls. Then real estate." Jaffee and his wife have set up an altruistic entity, the Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation, whose purpose is to give away their money.
This turns out not to be a straightforward enterprise, in part because the Jaffee fortune keeps growing, of its own accord, like giant kelp - "If we're making more than we're giving away, we're failing," a foundation employee remarks. And the usual challenges of doing effective philanthropy are in this case exacerbated by the fact that the philanthropist, Jaffee, is vague and whimsical about his charitable objectives. When a subordinate suggests to him that "we must deal with the world as it is," the boss responds: "We're changing that world."
Brooke is hired to help. Even though she is an inexperienced and inept junior employee (her title is program coordinator), the foundation is a tiny organization, and soon enough she catches Jaffee's eye: "This woman, Brooke, Black, gorgeous, serious, passionate, was the sort of woman he wanted at the foundation, the sort of woman he wanted working in his name. It was electric, almost chemical." Jaffee turns Brooke into his sidekick and companion. They have very fancy fun together. They secretly buy a huge Helen Frankenthaler painting as a birthday present for Mrs. Jaffee, they go to Lincoln Center to hear a performance of Mozart's Masonic funeral music, they drink whiskey and quote Shelley's "Ozymandias" as they contemplate Central Park from the old tycoon's enormous, glass-walled Fifth Avenue apartment. "This was Asher Jaffee's vantage on reality," Alam writes. "It was out there, somewhere, distant, something to look down on with amusement."
It feels like the setup of a familiar drama about workplace power and its abuses, but Alam has something more interesting in mind. Brooke, until that point something of a stock protagonist who elicits our stock sympathy, begins to undergo a strange psychological germination, like one of those seeds that need fire to sprout; it's as if the burning proximity of extreme wealth has stimulated her metamorphosis. Suddenly we find ourselves approaching Tom Ripley territory.
Brooke is convinced that Asher Jaffee, by virtue of his wealth - a word that doesn't appear in the novel; Alam insists on the less genteel "rich" - enjoys the true "freedom" she desires. Consciously refusing that word's connotations in the African American political tradition, the protagonist defines freedom as essentially a private, personal circumstance that's both material and ineffable. She becomes increasingly convinced, in increasingly deranged ways, that she has the right to have what she wants, even if she cannot yet afford it.
Wants, not needs: The distinction, derived from the world of advertising, is an important and explicit theme of the novel. Among them is a new selfhood: "Brooke wanted to be a different person. It came with such clarity that it was frightening. Change her. Save her." This desire is connected to the tormenting notion that "we're being deceived," as she says to a college friend, who, ironically, works as an advertising executive. "There's another place, adjacent to this one, so much better I don't know how to explain it."
Alam is best known for his third novel, the blackly surreal "Leave the World Behind," which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the subject of a Netflix movie starring Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali. The success of that book comes from its suspenseful elusiveness; you never quite know what the author is up to. "Entitlement" - a psychological thriller that subtly turns into a vicious exposé of affluent liberalism - also sneaks up on you, and wins you over.
ENTITLEMENT | By Rumaan Alam | Riverhead | 276 pp. | $27
Joseph O'Neill is the author, most recently, of the novel "Godwin."
PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY Chloe Cushman FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 International Herald Tribune
http://international.nytimes.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
O'Neill, Joseph. "An Old White Billionaire Mentors a Young Black Woman in the Art of Philanthropy." International New York Times, 24 Sept. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A809585586/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=61b22822. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
Bestselling author Rumaan Alam is happy to promote his new novel Entitlement (September 17). "I spend all of my time in this room hunched over this very computer, it's nice to have an opportunity to exist outside of that." After the massive success of his last book, Leave the World Behind, Alam is now focusing on money. "We valorized the rich, and by the same token, one must logically admit that we disregard the poor." Entitlement follows Brooke as she navigates the world of the megarich. "You can't help engaging or understanding yourself and your accomplishments in American life via money." Set in the not-too-distant past, the novel says a lot about where we are now and how we got here. "[Michael] Bloomberg as mayor was a fascinating cultural turn. It was the point at which we accepted if you are rich, maybe you know how to do something better. Which is obviously, on the face of it, ridiculous...the end result of that is Donald Trump. Somebody who is not gifted at anything, but feels like he presents himself like he is by virtue of his wealth."
SUBSCRIBE TO THE PARTING SHOT WITH H. ALAN SCOTTON APPLE PODCASTS OR SPOTIFY
Editor's Note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for publication.
How does it feel to have a book coming out that people are genuinely excited to read?
Well, I wouldn't know, because I refuse to allow myself to believe that. There are two muscles that are so important in this, one is the writing and one is the publishing. And, in a way, one has nothing to do with the other. Maybe muscle is not a good metaphor, because muscles all work cohesively. But I do think they're like two separate endeavors. And the moment that I'm in now, which is about publishing rather than writing, I hold it at some distance for myself, because I just think you're better off doing that. There's an imperative to be able to have a conversation like what I'm having with you, or just to be able to talk to booksellers or bookstore audiences, about what you've done. But I have to remember that as distinct from what the real job is, this part is just the fun part and the public, outside part. And I think it's good. I think it's useful to have this experience every couple of years when you're publishing a book. I spend all of my time here in this room hunched over this very computer, it's nice to have an opportunity to exist outside of that, but that's a different person. It's a different thing that's happening to a different part of my psyche. I try not to think too much about the theoretical readers, which I certainly don't take any of that stuff for granted, because publishing a book is competitive.
What inspired you to write Entitlement?
It's a book about money. That's a subject that's always interested me as a reader. It's a subject that has always seemed very rich to me as a writer, and it's a subject that, as a middle-class person, which is what the book is arguing, you can't help engaging with it. You can't help engaging or understanding yourself and your accomplishments in American life via money. And you can feel, at its extreme, like a loser if you don't own a home, for example. Even though you're participating in and in some ways victim to an economic system that is so different from the one that our grandparents would have lived under, in which homeownership is really a nebulous and vague promise for most of our peers, right? So you are caught in these contradictions, and even though, like most normal people, I think would say, "Oh, money can't buy happiness." "Money doesn't matter," all of these things. You also have to acknowledge that that's not really true, and that money can buy happiness, it can preserve health, it can provide access to education, can provide opportunity, and those are things that are profoundly enriching and make you really happy. So what are you supposed to do with that particular disconnect? With that particular dissonance? How do you go forward? We valorized the rich in this society, and by the same token, one must logically admit that we disregard the poor and that there is some moral value. You live in Los Angeles, I live in New York, there's no shortage of people in real crisis, real deprivation on the streets. You look at those people, like most normal people, you do not walk around thinking these people are garbage, these people are trash, whatever. That's not what you think. At the same time, there is some message inside of you that is, these people have not worked hard, have squandered some opportunity, they are ill, whatever, all of which may be true, but is a whole other idea apart from what I'm describing, which is that money has assumed this role as value. It's very, very hard to resist seeing things in dollar value. In fact, I would argue, and I think the book argues this, it is almost impossible.
What about this time period really inspired you?
First of all, I got to avoid writing about the pandemic or Trump, which are subjects I was not interested in exploring. But when you write about the recent past, what it does is, it feels legible to you, right? Like you were like, I was in New York at that time. I know what songs were on the radio. I know what I cared about. I know what was interesting, and you know how the story concludes, or you know what happens next in the timeline of the book. But they [the characters] don't know what is coming. And that tension adds something, I think, to the reading experience. I wanted to write a pre-pandemic book in part because I wanted to write about this New York that I am now nostalgic for, in which there were lots of people on the subway in the morning, or you could go to a restaurant [at any time]. Restaurants close really early now, it's really weird. I remember an experience in New York City where you could just go to a restaurant and get a table at 10 or 11. That's no longer the case. You almost have to have a reservation. You kind of have to go at seven or eight, which is fine. I'm an old man, I like to eat dinner at seven o'clock, but sometimes you go to a play and you get out of the play and you're like, "It's 11 p.m. let's go to dinner." And it's very weird to be in New York City like, "Wow, there's nothing open. There's nowhere to go." It's a bummer. So I was sort of trying to capture that New York.
The economy is also part of it during this time period, around Occupy Wall Street, the economic crash, etc. I think that's going to be relatable to a lot of people out of New York City.
In retrospect, I think that Bloomberg as mayor was a fascinating cultural turn. It was the point at which we accepted, the electorate seemed to accept, the mass seemed to accept that if you are rich, maybe you know how to do something better, right? Which is obviously, on the face of it, ridiculous. Bloomberg, he knew how to run an organization, so he ran New York City like an organization. You have to give him that he was self-made, whatever we mean by self-made. He wasn't really, no one is, but anyway, the end result of that is Donald Trump. Somebody who is not gifted at anything, but feels like he presents himself like he is by virtue of his wealth. Or Elon Musk, similar thing. Elon Musk is not like some great inventor, he's an acquirer of companies. It's all like based on happenstance. But I mean, he has people who passionately care about him because he's rich, which is not a personality trait. It's not anything. It's not really something to admire. But we, culturally, we do valorize the very rich, we really do. And it's kind of strange. I'm trying to think of all the billionaires I like, and none of them are that interesting.
Is Martha Stewart a billionaire? I think she's great.
Yeah, I like Martha Stewart. I like Oprah [Winfrey]. Oprah's a good one. But actually, Martha and Oprah are both interesting counters to what I'm describing. Both women, one must notice, who took a very personal thing and spun it into money, and their femininity and Oprah's Blackness are an essential part of their approach to the discharge of their power. Which is not salient for Michael Bloomberg and not really salient for the billionaire in my novel.
How much of yourself do you add to characters in your work?
I am not the person to ask that question. You should really ask my husband. When he reads my work, he's always says, "Oh, this is just you." He says that of all the people, everyone in the book is just me. And that is interesting, because it's probably true, because that's the tool you have, the self, right? I'm not a Black woman [like the protagonist in his novel], so she's not me in a literal sense, and also she's not real. So of course, she's not me, but a lot of what she describes thinking and feeling is stuff that feels familiar to me. I'm not crazy, and there's a question in the book about her psychic stability. She has an experience where she gets provoked by somebody's dog. I'm often provoked by people's dogs. I was at the beach on Tuesday--beautiful, quiet day at the beach, only me and my husband, and this woman's gigantic wet dog ran onto our blanket. And she was just like, "Oh, he's friendly." And I was like, "Get it the f**k away from me. What are you talking about? I don't care if he's friendly. He could be Snoopy, I don't want him on my stuff. Like, what's the matter with you?" I didn't attack this woman, but still. I think you cannot help endow people on a page with things that you're interested in, or things that you do, or things that you say, or things that feel familiar to you. I can't help it anyway.
What do you read while you're working?
When I was writing my first book, I was really afraid of being too closely influenced, so I didn't read anything for the period in which I was really intensely writing the book, and that made me feel really weird, because I'm such a reader. I felt so untethered from everything. I think now I kind of understand the impulses as distinct. Of course, what I'm reading is the fuel and engine, right? And so I can't help but in turn to some extent metabolizing what I'm reading, and that works effect on the finished book that I happen to be writing is hard to say, but I no longer worry too much about it. So I just read. I read a fair amount of stuff that I might be reviewing. I read a fair amount of stuff that I might be reading to blurb or as a favor to a friend, or because I've traded work with a friend. So I read in that way, yeah. But then I also just read for kicks. I read a lot of Phillip Roth the summer I was writing this book.
I mean, I can't imagine not reading. It's my default. It's just what I do. I get angry when I can't or feel like I'm not reading enough.
What I'm always in pursuit of as a reader is a fiction that takes me out of the self. I spent all day being myself, and then I get into bed at night and then I'm inside of something else. That's almost like a magic trick to me. I can't believe that books can do that. And that's what I want in a book. I always tell my kids, bring a book. Get a book. You're gonna be bored at this party, bring a book. I have so many memories of being utterly bored out of my skull as a child. And then I just would have a book. And it's like it didn't matter. My parents would take me to some stupid party, and I would sit in the car and read my book.
Your last book was huge. It was even made into a movie. Does that add any pressure to this book?
I should probably feel more panic than I do, but it's not profitable to think about it. It's so unlikely that I will be able to replicate that particular experience, that particular success, and in some ways that should not be my ambition. And it's not my ambition. That was a thing that happened to that one specific book, and it's incredible that it happened, and it's incredible that Sam Esmail wanted to make a movie. It's incredible that he actually got the movie made. It's incredible that the movie is good. It's incredible that Julia Roberts is in it. It's incredible that Mahershala Ali is in it. All of these things are very, very hard to believe, and all of them are completely outside of my control. All I can do is appreciate that that's what happened, and know that that's not what's going to happen with this book. It's just not, it's not like that. It isn't like that for most people, I suppose, even Julia Roberts herself, right? Like she could make a movie that makes hundreds of millions of dollars, makes another one, wins an Oscar, makes another one, and then makes one that is more minor. You can't operate at that level at all times, and you shouldn't actually aspire to because ultimately, it's the work that suffers if you're always living in this high. I should probably feel more stressed, but I'm just gonna choose not to.
What are you reading now that you're loving?
First of all, no one's ever gonna run out of things to read. And no one, in my opinion, should feel embarrassed or abashed about things that they haven't read. There's just like a such a huge list of classics that no one can really say they've read them all. And so I've been sort of enjoying reading into the canon and reminding myself that the books when you're 15 that you're assigned to read, or whatever, that you think are boring or dry or 100 years old and have nothing to hold, I've been enjoying discovering the extent to which that's not true. That a book like East of Eden, which I read earlier this summer, which is a century old, has a lot to say even now, which is why it is a classic. And to find that is so surprising. And so I've had a really weirdly fun time reading the classics, which is such a weird answer, and also sort of a troubling answer, because then what you're doing is reading a lot of books by white guys. Because, they got to decide what the classics were going to be, and that's what they decided. But so I read a book by Sinclair Lewis, American Nobel laureate. Nobody really, I don't think, really talks about Sinclair Lewis at all anymore, but he wrote this book called Main Street that was his big, big book. Big commercial hit. And it's a big fat book, and it is so good, oh, and so funny. A really funny book about the collision between idealism and reality, and between the collision of liberalism and reality. It's a really funny book about America. And the way reading is taught, or the way it was taught, at least when I was in high school, would have done a disservice by you. The teachers are asking you to read like, Thomas Hardy or Willa Cather, and you're 15, and you're like, I just want to make out with a boy. I don't want to read this boring book about covered wagons or whatever. It's only when you're older, I think, or have more of a grounding and reading that you're able to understand that Thomas Hardy or Willa Cather or Sinclair Lewis can talk to you across the distance of a century. And so I would say surprise yourself by rereading something you were forced to read in high school that you thought you hated.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 All rights reserved. Any reuse, distribution or alteration without express written permission of the publisher is prohibited. For permission: www.newsweek.com
http://www.newsweek.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Scott, H. Alan. "Rumaan Alam's New Book 'Entitlement' Shows the Haunted Trappings of Wealth; 'It's very, very hard to resist seeing things in dollar value. In fact, I would argue, and I think the book argues this, it is almost impossible,' Rumaan Alam tells Newsweek." Newsweek, vol. 183, no. 9, 4 Oct. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810221138/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4019b385. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.
Entitlement
by Rumaan Alam
Bloomsbury Circus, [pounds sterling]16.99, pp. 336
Money can't buy you love, the Beatles sang. But that doesn't matter so much if you're not interested in love, like Brooke Orr, the 33-year-old heroine of Rumaan Alam's fourth novel, Entitlement. In contrast to Alam's wildly successful, lockdown-resonant Leave the World Behind, the latest book is set in 2014, during the era of 'Obama's Placid America', a world depicted as a virtually frictionless pre-Trump utopia in which 'black, gorgeous, serious, passionate' young women such as Brooke can thrive. When she leaves her teaching job and joins the charitable Asher and Carol Jaffee Foundation--started after the benign octogenarian billionaire Asher Jaffee lost his daughter--she realises that money is where her heart lies. Yet Alam is at pains to investigate why Brooke Orr (and the auric resonance of her surname is surely intentional) is not straightforwardly avaricious.
She is adopted, with a white mother, and two white siblings, and while she appears confident, a worm of insecurity gnaws at her constantly: 'Her own mother... had not wanted her. Who then ever would?' In this respect she resembles a Jamesian or Whartonian heroine, making her way in a grownup world that she barely understands, unaware of her real motivations.
Her job at the foundation is to find 'money for people who deserved it', and she sets about this with gusto, attempting to give a sizeable donation to a children's dance school. But her philanthropic impulse is complicated by being suddenly immersed in the world of the super-rich, depicted as gods gazing down from Olympus. She loves setting down 'the mint-green corporate card with a satisfying little snap of plastic on wood', or salivating over the Monet in Jaffee's penthouse. What she really wants, however, is a simple stake in adulthood. Having never felt entitled to anything, she becomes convinced she deserves the things the previous generation took for granted: her own home, job security, even family life.
Of course, in a novel a sense of deserving what you see as your due is dangerous. It can lead to terrible decisions. Alam is canny enough to wrongfoot the reader by characterising both Brooke and Jaffee against type. Though Jaffee entertains romantic fantasies about Brooke (despite her being a surrogate daughter), he's not a predatory, privileged older male. And while Brooke acknowledges her mentor as the father figure she never had, she still dreams of a slice of his unimaginable wealth. The two circle each other for more than 200 pages before the final, inevitably explosive, confrontation.
Written with Alam's customary alertness to how small details (witness the 'fist-sized muffins of grated carrot, coconut, sunflower seed and date' baked by Jaffee's personal chef) can reveal a whole life, Entitlement is an engrossing exploration of the pitfalls of privilege and philanthropy.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Cook, Jude. "Heart of gold." Spectator, vol. 356, no. 10229, 14 Sept. 2024, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A808879484/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2c051ed3. Accessed 19 Oct. 2024.