Planetary Alienation: Domesticity, Data, and Decline in Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind

Abstract Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind (2020) reimagines the realist novel for a crisis-ridden present through its triangulation of three distinct textual elements: the uncanny experience of post-2008 domesticity, the predictive limitations of big data, and US anxieties over national decline. Together, these three elements compose a central feature and effect of the novel’s strange realism, which the author calls planetary alienation. This effect formally illuminates a particular facet of American experience after 2008—a tipping point in the period often referred to as the contemporary—in which the familiarities of routine, privilege, and national exceptionalism encounter a world rendered inexplicably unfamiliar by widespread ecological crisis. Although Alam’s novel never explains the mysterious crisis unfolding in its pages, many details and insights from its ominous third-person narrator suggest a situation that is ecological in quality and planetary in scope, despite its rigorous focus on specifically American repercussions. Following the domestic drama of two families as they navigate the strange new reality that has settled around them, Leave the World Behind suggests that the aesthetic structures of realism and literary expression have become fundamentally altered by the ecological metamorphoses of planetary crisis.