don’t know what’s happened exactly, but they know they don’t want to try to climb the 14 flights of stairs to their apartment with the power out. The TV and radio are both playing only a single sentence: “This is the emergency broadcast system.” Vague news alerts warn of a hurricane, but the internet is down. There’s been a blackout in New York City. Discomfiting the politely liberal Amanda and Clay, they are Black, and although they originally planned to spend the week in their Manhattan apartment, something seems to have gone terribly wrong. and Ruth Washington, the house’s wealthy 60-something owners. They plan to spend a week of vacation wallowing in the glorious luxuries of a house they are not rich enough to own but are rich enough to aspire toward - but then, on their first night at the house, there’s a knock at the door. The mustard-buying woman and the Worcestershire-daubing man are Amanda and Clay, respectively: upwardly mobile middle-class Brooklynites who have Airbnb’ed a house in rural Long Island with their two children. Subscribe to the Vox Book Club newsletter You know what kind of man makes his burgers by dabbling Worcestershire sauce into the ground beef “like daubing perfume onto a wrist.” And even if you are that kind of person (I confess I have a weakness for fancy mustard), you know that within the world of this book, such habits are going to feel ridiculous, if not worse. You know what kind of woman makes sure to buy the pebbly mud-colored mustard on her beach vacation. You can tell even at the beginning, before the horror begins to emerge, because Alam describes all of these luxuries with a loving precision that becomes its own form of judgment.
Because Leave the World Behind does not think that the pleasures it is cataloging are neutral pleasures that can be enjoyed and then abandoned without thought. The trance only lasts for moments, though. At times, reading Leave the World Behind can put you in something approaching the same state of blank tranquility you find scrolling through a lifestyle influencer’s Instagram feed. All-white linens in the bathroom and the laundry soap hidden in a tasteful wooden box. Pasta tossed with herbs and garlic and that salted European butter that comes in a cylinder. Marble countertops and a copper pot-filler at the stove. This book is nearly encyclopedic in its accounting of the pleasures of modern bourgeois American life. The big thing in Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, the Vox Book Club’s June pick, is all of the, well, things.
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