Leave the World Behind

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-19

Chapters 20-25

Chapters 26-32

Chapters 33-40

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

The Apocalypse as an Immediate, Interpersonal Concern

A key theme of Leave the World Behind is that an apocalyptic event would likely not look like our assumptions; rather than the mass chaos that is often depicted in fictional portrayals of apocalypses, it is a slow, almost banal process driven by confusion and disconnection from rational explanation that happens to each person individually. It is also an event without a protagonist, as is revealed by the way the characters individually try to assert themselves as the center of the narrative in their own minds and ultimately find themselves lacking the agency or heroism to act in a way that can change the course of events, even for their immediate community.

Until the last chapters of the novel, the apocalypse that the characters are facing often takes a back seat to the characters’ interpersonal clashes, which is driven by their individual desires to control the situation. It is only as Archie grows ill that the adults’ worry about their position within the power structure of the community starts to fade into a more communal attitude, but even then, the social dynamics continue to hinge on personal agenda: Ruth’s desire to not play the helpmeet to a White family, G. H.’s insistence that there’s a rational way forward, Clay’s belief that he should be a more capable patriarch, and Amanda’s rising panic keep fraying at the social order and prevent them from working together. This does not stop them, though, from coming to think of the vacation home as their mutual home.

The struggle for normalcy also plays a role here, as the characters continue to swim, have dinner, drink too much, have sex, and argue with each other as though the situation they are living through is temporary and rational. For the children, the most oppressive force of the apocalypse is boredom, and Rose counts a stack of DVDs as essential when she goes scavenging; she knows more than the others what the novel is trying to assert: Survival in a crisis requires ways to pass the time, as it will be a slow, prolonged experience.

There are two key passages that drive home the book’s take on the apocalypse: the “Did it matter […]” (120) and the closing passage of the book. Both use the omniscient narrator to expand the scope of the novel outward to tragedies happening elsewhere or on a national scale; in the first, the repeated question creates a sense of futility that provides its own answer: for the people in the vacation home, the apocalypse does not and cannot matter. The close of the book pulls out again, even to the point of considering the planet from the point of view of plant life, before ending on an assertion that is a key anxiety of the Anthropocene: There’s no way of knowing if we are already living in the last moments of our own personal history.

The Terror of the Unknown in the Information Age

The title of the book, Leave the World Behind, has a cruel double meaning, referring to both the desire of getting away from it all embodied in the remote vacation home and what the characters face as they realize the world they have known is not only over but replaced by something they have no framework to understand. Like an episode of Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone, the characters’ desires are met in a way that reveals the underlying horror inherent in them.

It’s clear in the opening chapters that the typical vices of the Information Age firmly entrench Clay and Amanda. They both have offloaded most of their knowledge onto their cellphones, and they thoughtlessly revel in the consumption available to them at the grocery store. Clay’s cigarettes, too, represent the way they rationalize the harm inherent in their lifestyle without addressing it. And though Clay is the one who grapples with shame about his habit, Amanda is just as addicted to the thrill of need and connection at work. The novel is making what, at the time of its publication, is a ubiquitous assertion: Modern society lives out of balance and is over reliant on technology.

What gives this assertion teeth, though, is the way disaster takes the characters’ sources of knowledge away from them. Without phones or internet, Clay and Amanda must rely on G. H. and Ruth’s version of the story, which itself is incomplete and based on what they could see in a blackout. This tension grows as more and more things go unknown to the characters, and they begin to cling to the things they do know—the ones that are true (filling a bathtub with water is important in an emergency) and the ones that no longer matter (G. H.’s insistence on thinking about and explaining the stock market). The characters have not had to trust each other or their own abilities in years, and they find themselves woefully unprepared, as is embodied by Clay’s aborted journey into town where he instantly becomes lost.

The omniscient narration also plays a role in the development of this theme, as it often hints at the characters’ lack of knowledge by providing bits of information that they themselves don’t know. Their connection to the world is nonexistent now, and they can no longer see the whole picture; the reader doesn’t receive the full picture, either, as the details they do get are reminiscent of the notifications on Amanda’s phone that disappear. The most profound effect that the apocalypse has on these characters’ lives (until Archie’s illness, at least) is in disconnecting them from the world.

Race, Class, and the Sharing Economy

In one of the opening moments of the novel, Amanda notes, “The people who owned this house were rich enough to be thoughtful” (9). The house is both well-appointed and meticulously cleaned and laid out, which Amanda sees as a luxury that is beyond her in her usual life. What she doesn’t think of at all is the way another person, Rosa the housekeeper, is responsible for this as much as Ruth and G. H. are; the absence of Rosa—who may or may not be the panicked woman that Clay meets and abandons while lost—echoes the way working-class people are invisible and dehumanized in a sharing economy. The woman on the roadside functions similarly to the occasional intrusions of servants in The Great Gatsby: Her presence in that moment calls attention to the narrative blank that surrounds her, reminding the reader that the main characters’ lives are all built on the privilege of treating those beneath them like something less than human.

Tensions rise and become much murkier when the question of race is explicitly at stake: Ruth and G. H. are Black, which comes as a surprise to Amanda and Clay, both of whom did not conceive of the possibility that rich, thoughtful people might be Black. This is one of many microaggressions that Amanda and Clay commit, which are complicated by the fact that they ultimately are in the other couple’s home. They have a contractual right to be there, but they are living through a situation where contracts are meaningless; still, both couples fall back on the decorum of honoring the agreement, leading to a situation in which Ruth and G. H. feel subservient in their own home. The racist connotations of a less accomplished, less deserving White family having full use of their property does not escape their notice, and Ruth in particular finds fault with the ways Amanda and Clay live their lives and refuses to step into a subservient role.

In many ways, Amanda and Clay are a criticism of the well-meaning White liberals of New York’s outer boroughs, as they think of themselves as progressive yet live in relative isolation that shelters them from having to confront their convictions. The intrusion of Ruth and G. H. into their lives shakes their sense of self, and their discomfort with race leads them toward bigoted thoughts and microaggressions, such as when Amanda compares G. H. to Denzel Washington and implies they may be related. Several times throughout the book, G. H. and Ruth face blame for bringing the real world to Amanda and Clay’s vacation, which echoes a racist argument in the political climate at the time of this book’s writing: Black people, through their insistence on talking about the ugliness of race and racism, are ruining public discourse.

The novel does offer a glimpse of hope, though: By the end of the book, the barriers are starting to break down as the characters start to think of the home as a collective community. Ruth’s offer to commingle the families’ laundry is emblematic of this, as is Clay thinking freely of G. H.’s resources as something that will protect him and referring to the vacation home as just home. Even as G. H. realizes Danny will continue to cling to tribalism influenced by his dislike of G. H. as a rich Black man, those issues are becoming less of a factor in the main character’s lives. The apocalypse does not erase their differences, but it does give them good reason to trust each other.