Rumaan Alam – Delusions of Whiteness

In Rumaan Alam’s new thriller, a white family staying at a Hamptons Airbnb is startled when the Black owners knock on the door.

- By Lila Shapiro

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND is out on October 6.

A LITTLE MORE THAN two years ago, the novelist and critic Rumaan Alam landed a job as the editor of special projects at The New York Times Book Review. It was a dream job—of course it was—and he pictured himself working at that hallowed institution for the rest of his career. But a few months into his tenure, he began to feel he was failing. Was he just not good enough to make it work? A troubling thought crept into his mind, one that had dogged him throughout his years working at prestigious New York media institutions: What if the Times had hired him not because it valued his mind but because it wanted to prove it cared about diversity? He was so disturbed by this possibility that he quit the job before the year was out.

This thought had haunted his life as a novelist as well. For as long as he had been a writer, Alam imagined that certain people, including editors and publishers, expected him to write about people he outwardly resembled. They didn’t say it outright, but he sometimes felt their faces or tones betrayed that they found him interesting less because of anything he said or wrote than because of where his parents happened to be from. This perception had partly shaped his first two novels, which he’d written from the perspectives of wealthy white women, a choice that felt to him like a quiet act of rebellion. The winter he left the Times, he secluded himself from his family in Brooklyn hotel rooms and poured his existential dread into his writing.