“Leave the World Behind,”

Rumaan Alam’s new book follows its characters to the Hamptons as the world crumbles around them.Photograph by David A. Land

There comes a moment in every disaster novel when a character stocks up on supplies or fantasizes about discovering them. This is the survivor’s dream: bulk-packed goods of Costco abundance. In Ling Ma’s “Severance,” a pandemic renders most of the world “fevered,” and a crew of survivors is rewarded by the endless material recompense of life in a mall: shelves of L’Occitane hand lotion, racks of Gap T-shirts. In Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven,” a “Georgian flu” flattens the world’s population, and one character makes six trips through the grocery store, dragging carts loaded with “cans and cans of food, all the tuna and beans and soup on the shelf . . . aspirin, garbage bags, bleach, duct tape.” He survives for months, and watches the rest of Toronto die outside his high-rise.

If such stocking up is common sense, it’s also a form of denial. Food may keep you alive, but the emotional wallop of a crumbling civilization can’t be numbed by a fibre-filled date-and-nut bar. So when we find Amanda, a central character in “Leave the World Behind,” Rumaan Alam’s enthralling third novel, prepping for her family’s Hamptons vacation with a gleeful trip to the grocery store, it is not a mark in her favor. Amanda buys yogurt and blueberries, sliced turkey, thick-cut bacon, “that pebbly mud-colored mustard,” twelve-dollar maple syrup, and the virtuous snack of the bourgeoisie, hummus. An upwardly mobile Brooklynite, she’s “the kind of woman interested in blending in,” and she feels protected, even validated, by the things that she tosses into her cart, like three pints of Ben & Jerry’s and recycled-paper coffee filters. But she’s about to get pushed out of her cosseted life, and all of its trappings—even the hummus—won’t save her.

“Leave the World Behind” is a coy little thing: a disaster novel without the disaster. Amanda, an advertising account director; her husband, Clay, a tenured professor and book critic; and their two kids, fifteen-year-old Archie and thirteen-year-old Rosie, have rented an Airbnb among the raspberry fields of rural Long Island. The house is “old but new . . . solid but light,” with a white picket fence, and made of brick, “the very material the smartest little piggy chose because it would keep him safest.” Soon after the novel begins, the family has finished up a long day at the beach, and a late-night knock on the door yanks them out of their reverie. It’s the house’s owners, George, or “G.H.,” and Ruth Washington, who bring news of a blackout across Manhattan—though they think the outage might have spread farther. The two families reluctantly hunker down in the home, which still has power.

Soon more disturbing news arrives, the way it so often does—via Times push notifications. There are vague headlines about the blackout hitting the whole East Coast and a hurricane making landfall. On her phone, Amanda sees “a final ‘Breaking’ followed by nonsensical letters.” Then the Internet blinks out. What is happening? Is there one crisis or a series of them? Over the next few days, Clay notices that the birds are silent. G.H. and Ruth mention that the private planes of their richest neighbors aren’t flying. Rose stands in the backyard and spots a herd of thousands of deer, unnerving in their congregation.

I expected, after all of this, the natural tick-tock of a disaster novel. The invasion or superstorm or missiles would arrive; the characters would run for it; inevitably, some innocent would be sacrificed to the gods who demand such things from novelists. But, although the tension heightens, no such moments arrive. Where other practitioners of the genre revel in chaos—the coarse spectacle of society unravelling—Alam keeps close to his characters, who, like insects in acrylic, remain trapped in a state of suspended unease. This, he suggests, is the modern disaster—the precarity of American life, which leaves us unsure, always, if things can get worse.

Despite the prospect of doom, the characters in “Leave the World Behind” spend a lot of time tidying the counters or chopping garlic. You get the sense that, if a 747 were to crash through the windows, their first instinct might be to run for the broom. Every calamity is met with an equal and opposite domestic reaction. When Clay heads for town seeking information and stays out long past the time he’s due, Amanda, in a nauseating gesture, whips up some Brie-and-chocolate sandwiches. When one character grows suddenly, alarmingly ill, two more bake a Duncan Hines cake and then pepper it “with sugar confetti, a nice little duet,” while Ruth collects everyone’s laundry, to “save them the trek to the Laundromat when they got home.” No matter how bleak the situation, these people cling to normalcy—and normalcy, as for any upper-middle-class American, entails consumption, comfort, and domestic equilibrium.

At the same time, another narrative voice worms its way into the text, sometimes in the middle of sentences. It is seemingly omniscient about the state of the world but proffers only small bits of information. It tells us what the characters don’t know, that planes have been “dispatched to the coast, per protocol,” that trapped subway riders are suffocating beneath Manhattan’s blacktop, that “a major television star had been struck by a car at the intersection of Seventy-ninth and Amsterdam and died because the ambulances couldn’t get anywhere.” The voice knows whether bombs are flying or the power grid’s been hacked, but it, too, remains nonchalant, its disinterest almost cruel, like a clinician observing a dying animal, clipboard in hand. Its interruptions both make the reader complicit and remind her that, in our world, we’ll never enjoy the luxury of clairvoyance.

After the Internet cuts out, the characters can’t watch the disasters rack up. Still, their reactions—fill the hot tub, keep the vodkas on ice flowing—are never quite in keeping with the scale of what’s happening around them. Amanda is more alarmed by the fact that the Washingtons are black—“those people didn’t look the sort to own such a beautiful house,” she thinks—and Ruth fusses over the sink, as though its messiness were deadly. We want these people to run, to find other humans, to do something, anything, that feels useful in crisis. And we judge them, too, as avatars of our own worst instincts, so enmeshed in the comforts of life that they believe that a pretty little home in the woods will keep them safe from the big bad wolf of civilizational collapse. It becomes clear, over time, that they’re trapped less in the house than in a fantasy of their making, even as doubt creeps in at the edges. “George had ten thousand dollars in cash tucked away for emergencies,” Ruth thinks. “They were rich!” But then, “Would any of that be a salve to whatever this was?”

Part of the problem is that these people aren’t just used to comfort; they’re used to crisis, and it’s left them unable to properly tabulate risk. These are characters who live in our political world, who know that “the morbidly obese grandson of the Eternal President” (Mr. Kim) has itchy fingers and that “this president” (Mr. Trump) is constitutionally unable to respond appropriately to disaster. “This kind of thing,” Clay thinks, as he and G.H. discuss whether terrorism might have caused the power outage, “used to sound like paranoia, but now it was just pragmatism.” They can putter on precisely because this new series of strange events is not so far from life as usual. Thinking of Venetian tourists snapping pictures of palazzos in waist-high water, Ruth notes, “It was like some tacit agreement; everyone had ceded to things just falling apart.” As a result, they have increasing tolerance for the absurd. What would it take for them—for us—to truly panic?

In most literature of this ilk, the disaster, whether rising seas or a virus, is a force of narrative tension: the reader is keen to learn how humans move from a time of upheaval to one of stability. Alam never gets there; upheaval is all his characters have. His achievement is to see that his genre’s traditional arc, which relies on the idea of aftermath, no longer makes sense. Today, disaster novels call for something different, a recognition that we won’t find a new normal, even if we’ve hoarded our Duracells and tucked ourselves behind sturdy walls in forested hideaways. The catastrophe came long ago, before Amanda went grocery shopping and the Washingtons left Manhattan, and before Clay submitted his latest piece to the Times Book Review. And it isn’t ending, only changing shape. In the book’s final pages, as the tension suddenly ratchets up, Amanda thinks to herself, “They were equipped to handle certain fears. This was something else. It was hard to remind yourself to be rational in a world where that seemed not to matter as much, but maybe it never had.”