When a book is so hailed on social media, one must dig in and read. At the very worst, a book so trumpeted by critics must have seams to unpick. A book coming from a former critic for The New York Times Book Review must have friends in high places. And so Rumaan Alam appears to have. Because this book, seemingly so very beloved in every literary corner of the (middle-class echo chamber) world, is touted as ‘the book of an era’ (The Independent) without delivering the basics.
Trope after trope might mangle into a literary novel in the right hands, but Alam’s hands seem to have grabbed wholeheartedly for one of those Netflix deals with a book that reads like a first-draft treatment for, oh, I dunno, a Julia Roberts vehicle, maybe? Someone like Jordan Peele sweeping up the pieces for some kind of shallow Black Mirror? Maybe a Sam Esmail.
It’s so perfect on paper: BAME writer with a literary background? Tick. Who writes ideal Netflix fodder? Tick. A book set in one location with a small cast? Tick. Nod to COVID and Black Lives Matter? Double tick. Of course he got a publishing deal! The agents were drooling at the bit (if not over their lockdown sourdough) at the thought of the TV deal that would follow. If this isn’t a masterclass in getting a book published in 2021 I don’t know what is. It’s so obtuse, so obvious. So greedy.
The book has a well-worn Stephen King meets Twilight Zone setup, but fails to have any of the (admittedly lighter) weight of either of those: White family of four goes to a rented vacation home (cue: cabin in the woods). Adults are bleary (cue: ginger sex in a hot tub). Children, one teen, one older teen (cue: whiny stuff). There’s angst. Then the owners turn up, the Black owners. Are we supposed to worry about that? The white family isn’t racist, so no drama there. The Black man (with a clear nod to Netflix’s future casting team) ‘looks like Denzel Washington’. There’s a big noise in the sky. Teeth fall out. Animals appear. Dad, aka The Leftovers Lite (hoping for Theroux, was Alam?), needs to smoke in the yard, even though everyone knows he smokes, yawn, trope. Characters shift personalities, what little personality they each have. There’s a bit of driving about.
In Alum goes anyway, throwing shapes of turgid prose for the first two-thirds of the book like an amateur magician. There is much redundancy, much verbosity (“that telephones knew who was calling obviated nicely” Ugh). Commas are misused, the author loses touch with any other punctuation. Ellipses are written as three dots instead of ellipses the whole grinding novel. Ideas and phrases are grouped, ungrouped, words muddied in their own heaviness. The mother, for no reason at all, is written by the male author gazing at her teen daughter’s ‘pudendum’. Later, the mother gets naked, stepping out of character as well as her clothing. That male gaze persists in this book, sweaty and annoying.
As other so-called literary authors love to do when they don’t know what to write, Alum diligently makes what can only be described as ‘the lists’ in place of motivation: what they are buying to eat, what they are eating, who is cooking, who is doing the dishes. This trope is a flag for lazy writing in any wannabe literary writer. Not that Alam’s writing is entirely sloppy. There are interesting descriptions at times, but they don’t link to the characters enough nor the thin plot to convince that this is the amazing piece of literature it’s being pumped as. It’s wanting to be some kind of masterpiece in that crossover realm of Michel Faber or Ishiguro but fails because the author doesn’t even try to convince himself, let alone the reader, that there’s anything original in his story bar the fleeting — and welcome — visual clips of flamingoes and deer.
For the last third of this marathon, as if an editor chained the writer to the chair to lose word count, poppy little sentences of not more than six words each come along. Pop, pop, pop. Something will happen now, surely? Anything? Maybe the prose is getting faster because something is going to happen. Please! Because this book is not character-driven, with its smattering of clichés revolving around what middle-aged people want, what kids do in the country (spelled out for us). And that noise in the sky that is never really explained. At this point, the author suddenly realizes we won’t understand what is happening in his head because it’s not on the page, so starts adding in quick snips of what’s happening in other places in the world. Boring. Show not tell.
This is not literary fiction. It’s not plot-driven, either, so it’s not genre fiction. So what is it? Disappointing as hell, that’s what it is.
If we’re going to start writing books in order to gain TV adaptations, then we’re going to lose the art of writing novels. A book isn’t written to be adapted, it’s its own creature and has its own beauty, and that should be respected by someone who attests to liking literature such as this author. But somehow, the tropes have won, the emperor is wearing clothes even if this reviewer can’t see them. Apparently, there’s a Netflix deal with Julia Roberts and Sam Esmail in the offing. Fingers crossed it’s better than Bird Box!
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