![]() ![]() Both the advantages and disadvantages of this approach are evident in Leave the World Behind, Alam’s third novel, which is an odd hybrid of thriller and social satire. Tensions are left unexplored paths for development are foreclosed. With chapters often only three or four pages long and tending to cut away just as a scene starts to get complicated, the effect is disconcerting, destabilizing. Lacking the capacity for deep reflection, his characters drift along in their bubbles, so perfectly self-absorbed that the other people in their lives are all but invisible, except to the extent that they function as projections. His interest lies in taxonomies of race and class, not in generating the reader’s empathy or evoking an emotional response. ![]() He has an interior barometer exquisitely calibrated to signifiers of social class. For Alam, who writes about his characters as if he were a medical student dissecting a cadaver, psychological depth is not the point. ![]()
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