LARB

<h5>Deanne Stillman is the author of Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango as well as Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave.  </h5> 
<h5>Here, she speaks with us about her fascination with the Mojave and her latest book, Desert Reckoning: A Town Sheriff, a Mojave Hermit, and the Biggest Manhunt in Modern California History</h5> 
<h5>  </h5> 
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Deanne Stillman, "Desert Reckoning"

Deanne Stillman, \"Desert Reckoning\"

LARB Quarterly, no. 39: Air

Georg (György) Lukács (1885–1971) was a literary theorist and philosopher who is widely viewed as one of the founders of “Western Marxism” and as a forerunner of 20th-century critical theory. Lukács is best known for his Theory of the Novel (1916) and History and Class Consciousness (1923).

Georg Lukács

History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics

Mitchell Cohen is emeritus co-editor of Dissent magazine and a professor of political science at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Among his books are The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart (2017) and The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics, and a Hidden God (2016), both published by Princeton University Press.

Mitchell Cohen

Georg Lukács’s Two Natures: The Centenary of “History and Class Consciousness”

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, one of the college’s highest honors. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019–20 academic year). Yancy is the author, editor, and co-editor of over 20 books. His latest book is entitled Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (2023). At Academic Influence, he is cited as one of the top 10 influential philosophers in the decade 2010–20, based upon the number of citations and web presence. He has also published over 200 combined scholarly articles, chapters, and interviews that have appeared in professional journals, in books, and at various news sites. He is well known for his influential essays and interviews in the New York Times philosophy column The Stone and at the progressive nonprofit news organization Truthout. He is also series editor of Philosophy of Race at Lexington Books.

George Yancy

WHEN I DISCOVERED the field of philosophy at roughly the age of 17, I was seduced by its abstraction from—or its abstraction away from, as the late philosopher Charles W. Mills would put it—the world of nonideal theory; of harmful immigration policy; of pain and suffering; of racism, anti-Blackness, sexism, femicide, classism, genocide, oppression, poverty, xenophobia, transphobia, white domination, ableist normativity. I’m sure that this is partly why I fell in love with Plato, especially his theory of Forms, which holds that ordinary physical objects are mere appearances—images, shadows—that don’t provide us with true knowledge but with opinion only. It was the immutability of the Forms that transfixed my attention, not the contingent suffering of Plato’s teacher, Socrates, condemned to death by drinking hemlock for being a gadfly. The implication was that, as a philosopher, I had to transcend the messiness of empirical reality, had to stay focused on and seek out capital-R Reality through conceptual abstraction. 
 
This assumption was indicative of mainstream philosophy as I learned it as an undergraduate philosophy major in the early 1980s. My philosophy professors, for the most part, were mainly engaged in what felt like disembodied abstraction and conceptual minutiae. I recall that there was one philosopher who made it clear to me that he didn’t believe the stuff he taught in philosophy of religion but simply liked to argue. In the classroom, I witnessed what seemed to be a fetishization of argumentation, not to mention philosophical hubris. The objective was to escape, through pure intellection, the cave of ignorance that Plato allegorized as our unfortunate human condition. 
 
So, I was struggling there to see beyond what was before me, trying to extricate myself from what were deemed mere shadows, simulacra. It was only later that I came to realize that practicing philosophy in this vein isn’t about philosophy tout court but rather about a particular understanding of philosophy, a construction that refuses to see the ugly face of human suffering and seems incapable of doing—or unwilling to do—anything to eradicate that suffering. The questions posed, and the answers given, stem from what Mills, in his 1994 essay “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-American Experience,” calls a “perk of social privilege.” 
 
Critiquing a narrow understanding of theory in her provocative 1984 essay <a href="https://openspaceofdemocracy.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/adrienne-rich-notes-toward-a-politics-of-location.pdf">“Notes Toward a Politics of Location,”</a> Adrienne Rich writes that “theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn’t smell of the earth, it isn’t good for the earth.” The relevance of Rich’s point regarding how theory can lose the smell of the earth speaks to how philosophical reflection can function as a form of mere spectatorship (theōros), where there is no investment in the world other than to view it at a distance. In this context, I had become a young philosopher who lost his sense of smell, his sense of the mundane, the quotidian muck and mire of human existence. When I was a graduate student at Yale, I met philosopher Cornel West for the first time, not long after he was arrested and jailed for protesting the university’s investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. His actions spoke to what it means to be true to Socratic parrhesia (courageous speech) and how we mustn’t avoid what he calls the <a href="https://brotherwisedispatch.blogspot.com/2017/04/prophetic-fragments-existential-blues.html">“raw funky stinky stuff of life.”</a> 
 
In this regard, it isn’t lost on me that, at this moment in history, roughly 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children were brutally killed by Hamas on October 7, and that, since that tragic day, over 10,000 Palestinians, including over 4,000 children, have been brutally killed by Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza. That is the stuff that my early introduction to philosophy didn’t prepare me for. There were discussions of death but not of severed body parts, deep lamentation, the unimaginable grieving for brutalized children. When I was an undergraduate, ensconced within the pristine halls where philosophers pontificated about truth, reality, beauty, substance, justice, ethics, the good life, and the meaning of meaning, the whiteness and maleness of philosophy were hypervisible, and the anti-Blackness held by many of the West’s prominent thinkers, including Hume, Kant, and Hegel, was sidestepped or deemed irrelevant. The painful sounds of a George Floyd calling for his mama, the reality that he was knelt on for over nine minutes by the white police officer Derek Chauvin, would not have been discussed with philosophical vigor given the meta-philosophical policing of professional journals, college curricula, and academic colloquia, the places where “real” philosophy takes place. 
 
These days, these trying times, these moments of existential ruin, where we are 90 seconds to midnight, which is the closest we have ever been to global catastrophe, I find myself less and less moved by Auguste Rodin’s bronze sculpture of The Thinker. As a philosopher, I find myself immersed instead in Edvard Munch’s The Scream and, as a Black philosopher, located in the midst of what Christina Sharpe calls <a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a43012829/christina-sharpe-in-the-wake/">the wake,</a> the horrid afterlife of slavery. Despite my bona fides as a professionally trained philosopher, this identity in no way keeps me safe from being racially profiled or prevents me from being shot by a police officer who mistakes my cell phone for a weapon. That prospective horror—and so much more—makes up the funk, the harsh reality, that philosophy must face, must engage with, must not avoid by abstracting from the smell of the earth. 
 
The decision to curate this special series on philosophy’s importance at times like these was partly motivated by my own practice and understanding of the imperative to do philosophy as a mode of public-facing work. I wanted to demonstrate just how important and relevant specific conceptions of philosophy (implicit and explicit), and specific praxes of philosophers, can be in times of deep social, political, and existential trauma. The six philosophers gathered for this series celebrate what philosophy is capable of. Each is invested in philosophical plurality, which doesn’t mean that anything goes or that all views are equally well-thought-out or critically valid. These thinkers have no pretensions of being able to perform what Donna Haraway refers to as “the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.” Each embodied philosophical voice is deeply situated, invested not in navel-gazing but in bearing witness to other embodied voices that have been marginalized and deemed nugatory. 
 
I have curated this special series because I see philosophy as asking of us nothing less than to face the reality of the world and of who we are with as much honesty as we can manage. It asks us to grieve that world, and to grieve our own mistakes within that world, and yet also to be moved by the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love to transform that world for the better. Asking for modes of change that involve the mutual flourishing of all human beings is, as sad as it may sound, an act of deep risk-taking; it can be dangerous. My public-facing philosophical practice has made me the target of death threats, racist projections, and vicious name-calling. I was even placed on the infamous <a href="https://www.professorwatchlist.org/search">Professor Watchlist</a> for writing <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/dear-white-america/?_r=0">a letter of love to white people.</a> In these times of narrow ideological allegiances and goose-stepping conformity, philosophers who ask “why?” as a challenge to the status quo are asking an unsafe question. And that fact, more than anything else, shows us why we need philosophy in times like these. 
 
In this special series, I am honored to share this space with philosophers who understand, with clarity and urgency, the role that philosophy must play in transforming the world, in helping to push us closer to the not yet—the manifestation of worldwide justice and the recognition of the unquestionable humanity of all peoples. Coming out tomorrow are essays by Jay L. Garfield and Vanessa Wills. <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-apology-for-philosophy">Garfield draws from a panoply of philosophical voices and traditions, arguing for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary ways of seeing and doing philosophy.</a> While stressing philosophy’s ability to address pressing questions about climate change and structural racism, capitalism and colonialism, he also argues for the capacity of philosophy to generate beauty in our lives. <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/philosophy-in-times-like-these">For her part, Wills engages several issues in what increasingly feels like our inevitable march toward a dying planet: the forcible displacement of human beings, mass imprisonment, book banning, and COVID-19 denialism.</a> Both essays speak to the deep pertinence of philosophy conceived as a forceful intervention in the world, as opposed to an arcane practice performed in the confines of a stove-heated room (à la Descartes). 
 
Next Monday, December 4, essays by Kate Manne and Todd May will be published. And then, on Monday, December 11, two final essays, by Elizabeth Brake and Lori Gallegos, will appear. With clarity of thought and a refusal to think in philosophical lockstep, these six philosophers “talk back” (as bell hooks would say) to the profession of philosophy, to its hermetic proclivities, its pretensions of political neutrality, its silencing of voices that don’t reflect the interests of cishet white men, its refusal to embrace the smell of the earth. 
¤ 
Featured image: Robert Delaunay. <a href="https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/62309">Rythme/3.</a><a href="https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/62309">,</a> 1938. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Bequest of Judge Julius Isaacs, New York, 1983. <a href="https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/">tepapa.govt.nz</a>, CC0. Accessed November 3, 2023. Images has been cropped.

When Philosophy No Longer Smells of the Earth

Aya Labanieh is a Syrian American writer, translator, academic, and aspiring stand-up comedian. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, studying imperial conspiracies and their conspiracy-theory afterlives in literature and media. She currently serves as research associate for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Ancient Near East, and has led multiple public humanities projects, such as GATE: From Babylon to Berlin (2023), which invited migrant Middle Eastern poets and musicians to reflect on exile, belonging, and Babylonian antiquity at Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, and edited volumes Global Science Fiction and Approaches to Teaching Gilgamesh. Her public-facing writing has appeared in Aeon magazine, Ancient Exchanges, Culturico, and Politics/Letters.

Aya Labanieh

No Fap: A Cultural History of Anti-Masturbation

Vanessa Wills is associate professor of philosophy at the George Washington University. She is a founding co-editor of Spectre, a biannual journal of Marxist theory, strategy, and analysis. Her monograph, Marx’s Ethical Vision, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Vanessa Wills

The aim of <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-philosophy-no-longer-smells-of-the-earth">this curated series of essays</a> is to address the question: why is philosophy important at times like these? For many, philosophy is a field of inquiry that remains so esoteric, narrow, and specialized that it has little or no relevance to the everyday world of “ordinary” people. Indeed, philosophers are often characterized as introverted, absent-minded thinkers who are obsessed with analytical minutiae, isolated in their academically cloistered spaces (offices and personal studies) in a monologue with dead white guys, and prone to encouraging dispassionate argumentation and one-upmanship. For the thinkers writing for this series, however, philosophy is a social enterprise that strives for clarity of thought and encourages the formation of multiple cultural spaces of philosophical practice that are welcoming to a diverse range of scholars and laypeople, rather than simply those who look alike and share the same hegemonic meta-philosophical assumptions about the field. 
¤ 
PHILOSOPHY DREW ME IN by offering something highly unique and valuable to a Black teenage girl from an immigrant working-class family in 1990s Philadelphia. Among the logical puzzles, the formal linguistic analysis of abstract metaphysical concepts, and the thought experiments about possible worlds, the concrete limitations of the actual world hardly seemed real. Where worldly obstacles of privilege and prejudice made themselves nonetheless felt, I could console myself with the logical certainty that these were irrational, unjustified, and perhaps, therefore, impermanent. 
 
Like science fiction, philosophy was fun, wild, and creative, rebelling against any tyranny of what is over our license to imagine what might be. The union of imagination and reason promised to reveal new truths that might remain hidden were we to restrict scholarly inquiry to the actual and not explore the conceptual terrain of the as yet merely possible. Constantly to ask, “But what if things were otherwise?” seemed to be philosophy’s main business. 
 
Contemporary academic philosophy largely self-identifies with a Socratic tradition of rigorous challenge to received wisdom and the status quo. Ask the right question, apply the right logical test, wield the right objection like a scalpel, and—if all goes well—then down tumble our ill-founded assumptions, sophistical fallacies, and logical inconsistencies. But something seems to happen on the way between the abstract notion of philosophy as the love of wisdom and actual philosophical practice. The fearlessness of asking about the counterfactuals can easily become a manner of safe and even cowardly retreat from the world, with not much to offer back to the world or to our attempts to make sense of it. 
 
The question “What if things were otherwise?” has no real content except when grounded in a rational and empirical accounting of how things now are, and of what follows logically from the fact that they are as they are. This space is too brief to attempt exhaustively to describe our current times, but I can mention briefly what I take to be some particularly salient features about them. Then, we might say more about what philosophy has to offer us who are living in them. 
 
Let us start with the implacable reality that looming before us at the end of our current path is a future on a dying planet. As of this writing, it is summer 2023 and we have recently experienced Earth’s single hottest day on record. The planet will only get hotter and hotter from here. Crops will fail, seas will rise, and resource conflicts will heighten and spread. 
 
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/us/about-unhcr/who-we-are/figures-glance">estimates</a> that, at the end of 2022, 108.4 million of the world’s people had been “forcibly displaced.” This number steadily increases year by year—exponentially so over the last several years—as war and conflict drive people from their homes in places like Syria, Sudan, Palestine, and Ukraine. It does not include “voluntary” economic migrants— people who risk their lives to reach metropoles in the United States and Europe for a chance to survive, rather than remain in places where the vicissitudes of global capitalism have consigned them and their families to poverty, starvation, and death. 
 
On June 14, 2023, a boat containing about 750 people seeking better lives and economic opportunities sank into the Mediterranean Sea, killing as many as 500 of its passengers in what EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/17/world/greece-boat-worst-ever-tragedy-mediterranean-sea-intl-hnk/index.html">has called</a> possibly “the worst tragedy ever” to take place in those waters. Amid conflicting reports, what remains clear is that Greek Coast Guard ships present at the site of the tragedy did not render aid to the distressed ship as it drifted for hours before sinking. 
 
In the German town of Sonneberg this June, the notoriously far-right Alternative für Deutschland <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/26/far-right-afd-wins-local-election-watershed-moment-german-politics">won its first district council election ever,</a> having surged in popularity among voters across Germany over the past year. This marks the first time that a far-right politician has been elected in Sonneberg since the end of the Third Reich. 
 
Since national borders require a massive infrastructure of state violence to defend them, especially as conditions grow more desperate and unlivable for more and more people, it is unsurprising that far-right political parties, promoting authoritarian policies, have capitalized on the crisis to make large electoral gains throughout Europe. That the interests of the nation-state trump the interests of vulnerable human beings is the fundamental premise of restrictive and exclusionary immigration policies. Where all mainstream political parties agree on this, the Far Right distinguish themselves as the most consistent and committed adherents to that tenet. 
 
To say just a bit more about our times: the trend towards greater authoritarianism characterizes the political situation in the United States domestically as well. American cities <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/08/the-blue-budget-what-major-cities-spend-on-police/">devote about 25 to 40 percent</a> of their annual budgets to policing, on average. In the years following the Black Lives Matter protests in spring 2020, city governments mostly further <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/cities-vowed-2020-cut-police-funding-budgets-expanded-2021-rcna9864">increased police budgets</a> despite activists’ calls to defund police and fund necessary social services instead. 
 
This past year, politicians across the US have instrumentalized transphobic talking points to justify <a href="https://www.hrc.org/resources/attacks-on-gender-affirming-care-by-state-map#:~:text=As%20of%20November%202023%2C%20three,care%20ban%20had%20been%20introduced.">bans on gender-affirming care</a> for young people, with some states, such as Texas and Florida, going so far as to consider the provision of medically appropriate care to trans youth “child abuse”—paving the way for the state to seize children and prosecute their parents. The state of Texas has <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/07/11/1107741175/texas-abortion-bounty-law#:~:text=It%20allows%20private%20citizens%20to,%2410%2C000%20in%20damages%20from%20defendants.">passed a law</a> that effectively issues a $10,000 “bounty” on patients who seek abortions and anyone who assists such patients. There has been an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/books/book-ban-rise-libraries.html">uptick in book bans</a> in schools and libraries across the country. None of this is even to mention <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/07/05/1109444617/the-supreme-court-conservative">recent Supreme Court decisions</a> that blithely shed the appearance of judicial neutrality and reveal the court’s character as an organ of unaccountable power. 
 
Overwhelmingly, these are times of rising geopolitical tensions, of ascendant far-right extremism, of increasingly authoritarian state bureaucracies, and of looming climate disaster. This all transpires against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which the WHO <a href="https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covid-19-estimating-global-excess-mortality">estimates</a> has killed three million people worldwide, providing a template for how the world’s governments will handle the further waves of mass death to come—“sacrificing lives for the economy.” 
 
I say all this not to depress the reader but to concretize the question at hand: what can philosophy offer anyone in times like these? 
 
I do not think there is just a single answer. In my philosophical work, I tackle racism, capitalism, human rights, and other similarly worldly and practical concerns. I practice and advocate socially engaged, socially aware philosophical research that grounds itself in the tradition of liberation struggle and the resistance of the oppressed, seeking not merely to “interpret” the world but also to transform it radically for the better. Yet, just as philosophy once represented for me a kind of mental retreat or escape from the world’s troubles, it would be disingenuous of me now to say that years of activism, historical study, and professional experience have taught me that philosophy is only ever wrongly or illegitimately approached in that manner. 
 
Philosophy does offer us an array of charming puzzles and opportunities for free, creative, intellectual play; this is good. Students, however challenging, eye-opening, and enriching the rest of their coursework might be, often find that philosophy classes offer them their first experiences of something like thinking done for its own sake, as an intrinsic pleasure. In a political environment where the aims of education are increasingly narrowly subordinated to the immediate staffing needs of “job creators” and every human endeavor seems to be valued just for its “usefulness” (read: profitability), this role for philosophy and philosophical education should be defended. 
 
Philosophical inquiry, however, even when apparently unmoored from some particular practical end, is always sociohistorically situated. This remains the case despite all our representations of philosophical methods and truths as somehow “eternal” and abstractly universal. Indeed, for a field that often represents its concerns as being far removed from contingent worldly matters, the ideas that overwhelmingly shape the mainstream “canon” of Western philosophy have tended to arise out of periods of great social and political upheaval. For Hobbes, it was the English Civil War that led him to wonder how the individualism of the modern age could be rationally reconciled with the order and stability of the old world. Both Kant and Hegel were heavily influenced by the tumult of the French Revolution. Even the consolidation of analytic philosophy as the dominant tradition within Anglophone philosophy departments during the mid-20th century is difficult to comprehend outside the context of the Cold War and the chilling effect of McCarthyism on the American academy. 
 
Central to many of the defining political conflicts and existential challenges facing us today is an attack on reason and rationality. Denialism about the medical dangers posed by COVID-19, for example, is a posture that has moved from the fringes of right-wing nihilism to become a mainstream response, with the needs of vulnerable populations especially relegated to the margins. COVID denialism is of a kind with climate change denialism, which is committed to delegitimizing the consensus opinion of climate scientists worldwide regarding the urgency of drastic measures to slow global warming. 
 
Not only patently unjust, policing and imprisonment in the US are also flagrantly unscientific, rooted in racism and retributivism. They are conducted in a manner practically guaranteed to produce more crime and social ills rather than less, even while politicians and law enforcement agencies insist that the most rational response to crime is to hire more police officers and build more capacity to mete out state violence. Transphobic movements—growing internationally and, not coincidentally, acting as recruitment grounds for the Far Right—claim an interest in “biology” even while promoting an anti-intellectual, anti-science agenda that dismisses decades of medical research and expert consensus as mere “woke” opinion. 
 
Bad arguments, faulty reasoning, shoddy premises—these are just the sorts of things that philosophy ought to criticize and provide an antidote for. Yet, too often, philosophers have tended to resist putting philosophy to that use, preferring not to risk the objectivity of their reflections by sullying them with matters in which they might take some personal interest—like the survival of humanity. 
 
In the 2000s, the start of my graduate education coincided with the further hardening of the US state into a permanent war bureaucracy through the Patriot Act, the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, and the initiation of the so-called “war on terror.” The philosophy seminars I attended could not have seemed more eerily removed from the reality of mayhem and death being rained down upon innocents in the name of peace, the arbitrary torture and detention spuriously cloaked with the rule of law, and the massive protests, in cities across the United States and elsewhere, fighting to uphold and extend the legacy of the anti-war movement of the 1960s. 
 
It was learning more about the importance of revolutionary ideas, and their centrality to and emergence from popular struggles, that reinvigorated my love of philosophy. The more that I came to understand that philosophy itself has a history—one that is living, dynamic, contested, and shaped in and through mass upheaval—the more I realized that its main usefulness was not in transporting me away from the world but in bringing me into closer connection with it. Philosophy can then be not mere escapism or retreat but, at least in part, the art of considering real alternatives to what now exists. 
 
Where philosophers retreat from practical, worldly concerns, they leave open a space for the kind of pseudoskeptical posturing that is now all-too-familiar from far-right discourse. The pose of “just asking questions” soon gives way to an irrationalist, anti-intellectual nihilism, attracting those who seek meaning in an increasingly grim and chaotic world while running cover for those who prefer we do nothing to prevent the mass suffering that our current sociopolitical arrangements necessarily produce. 
 
But to engage in what Karl Marx once called the “ruthless criticism of all that exists”—asking of every single thing why it is this way; what caused it to be as it is; what is its essential character; what, if anything, justifies it in persisting in its current form; and what might come to be the case if some things, or maybe all things, were otherwise than they now are—is central to philosophy and to humanity’s best attempts to make sense of the world. As authoritarianism spreads and gathers strength around the globe, philosophy’s capacity to liberate and exercise our critical imaginations becomes only more vital and necessary, with each moment bringing us closer to a future that we are creating now, consciously or not. 
¤ 
Featured image: Frank Weitzel. <a href="https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/36512">Abstract design no. 2</a>, 1931. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Gift of Rex Nan Kivell, 1953. <a href="https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/">tepapa.govt.nz</a>, CC0. Accessed November 21, 2023. Image has been cropped.

Philosophy in Times Like These

Rumaan Alam&nbsp;is the author of&nbsp;Rich and Pretty. His writing has appeared in&nbsp;The New York Times, Elle, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Rumpus, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere. He studied at Oberlin College and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Rumaan Alam

Leave the World Behind

Elena Sheppard is an MFA candidate in non-fiction writing at Columbia University. Her essays, reviews, and other writings have been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, and Elle among others. She is Cuban-American. You can follow her on Instagram <a href="https://www.instagram.com/eleshepp/?hl=en">@eleshepp</a>.

Elena Sheppard

THE CHARACTERS IN Rumaan Alam’s ominous new novel, Leave the World Behind, directly grapple with a series of important existential questions: 1. How do you behave in an emergency? 2. What kind of prejudices do you, liberal you, hold quietly in your heart? And 3. What do you do when you’re afraid? 
 
The novel’s six principal characters, all stuck together in a house due to an unknown national crisis, handle these questions in their own ways. Some, like Rose, a 13-year-old girl on vacation with her family, find themselves unexpectedly and innately prepared for hardship; they are resilient, even brave. Others, like Clay, Rose’s father, are forced to confront unpleasant truths: “He couldn’t bear admitting what sort of man he was when tested.” 
 
Leave the World Behind feels right in sync with 2020. If we have learned anything in this calamitous, unrelenting year, it is that catastrophe can be slow to unravel and unexpected when it does. And even when a calamity unfolds, there are things that still must be attended to, like eating, sleeping, scratching an itch. “Business as usual, the business of being alive.” 
 
The story begins with Amanda and Clay, “middle-class people,” along with their two children Archie and Rose, driving from Brooklyn to the Hamptons for a summer getaway. They’ve rented a house for a week, the online description of which calls it a place to “leave the world behind.” The vacation affords them, along with the perks of relaxation and togetherness, the opportunity to pretend this luxurious life in this expensive house is their own. “[T]hey could pantomime ownership for a week.” 
 
That illusion is quickly shattered when the home’s rightful owners, G. H. and Ruth Washington, show up late one night begging pardon but asking to be let in. “Something happened” in the city, “a blackout” they think; but the scale of it immediately feels far bigger than that — the internet is down everywhere, and before their phones crashed Amanda received a push-alert saying the blackout was affecting the entire East Coast. “This is our house,” G. H. tells Amanda and Clay, “We wanted to be in our house. Safe. While we figured out what’s going on out there.” 
 
This, Alam’s third novel, takes place in the early days of this Armageddon-type event’s unfurling. And while the characters of the novel are geographically removed from whatever is happening, which may have spared their lives, they are forced to directly confront different challenges and dynamics. 
 
Before the Washingtons’ arrival at the house, Leave the World Behind embodies that languid summer space where minutes move like molasses but before you know it it’s happy hour. After the arrival of G. H. and Ruth, time seems to slow even further but in the way it does in an emergency; seconds feel like minutes. “That day’s morning seemed distant.” 
 
In addition, aside from the inherent awkwardness of homeowner and renter suddenly existing together under the same roof, Leave the World Behind tackles head-on some of the most pervasive social complexities of modern American life: class and race. It is at once a page-turner and a lyrical social commentary. G. H. and Ruth are Black, wealthy, in their 60s; Clay and Amanda are white, middle class, in their 40s. The fact that G. H. and Ruth are Black surfaces latent prejudices from their white renters. “The place was comfortable but sufficiently anonymous that she had not bothered to try to picture its owners,” Amanda reflects on the home and the people who own it. “[A]nd now, seeing them, she knew that if she had bothered to picture them, her picture would have been incorrect. This didn’t seem to her like the sort of house where black people lived. But what did she mean by that?” Later on adding, “[T]hose people didn’t look like the sort to own such a beautiful house. They might, though, clean it.” 
 
There is also a performance of non-racism that happens among the characters and on the page. After a consideration of whether or not to let G. H. and Ruth into the house, the omniscient narrator says of Amanda and Clay, “They let those people in because they were black. It was a way of acknowledging they didn’t believe all black people were criminals.” As Clay ruminates, “Morality was vanity, in the end.” 
 
These racial complexities are not new territory for Alam, whose previous novel, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/self-centered-or-savior-transracial-adoption-in-that-kind-of-mother/">That Kind of Mother</a>, delved into the dynamic of a white mother and a Black nanny she hires to take care of her son. Alam seems intent on exploding racism and its complexities via the analysis of very specific relationships and dynamics. 
 
While the four adult characters in Leave the World Behind try and navigate their dynamics within the house, they also are trying to figure out what is going on in the world. “It could be fallout. It could be terrorism. It could be a bomb,” Ruth speculates about what caused the blackout. But the point being underscored seems to be that it doesn’t matter what caused it; it only matters how they cope. 
 
Alam’s novel feels far more concerned with questions of character, prejudice, and morality than it does with plot. His book seems to be built on a thesis of exploring what disaster does to a person, and at times, the characters feel like vehicles for that thesis rather than characters in their own right. There is also coldness present that matches the sterility of the air-conditioned vacation home. These characters are undergoing an Armageddon of sorts — military jets soar overhead, flamingos come out of nowhere to play in the pool, thousands of deer flood the yard —&nbsp;but there is a feeling of watching these scenes from a distance. It is as if G. H., Ruth, Clay, and Amanda are trapped in a dystopian snow globe, and as we read, we are merely watching them shake, not experiencing it by their sides. Considering how visual the book is though, it is no surprise that it has already been optioned to be a <a href="https://deadline.com/2020/07/netflix-julia-roberts-denzel-washington-sam-esmail-leave-the-world-behind-auction-rumaan-alam-novel-1202989464/">Netflix movie</a> starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. The story feels ripe to make that jump. 
 
There is a pervasive sense that the characters are trapped in a tableau, which in part could be a commentary on their luxurious backdrop, the sly way this cocooned vacation home starts to feel suffocatingly isolated. Early in the novel a passivity settles over the group, and while that too could be because they are in a comfortable space, it is never satisfactorily examined. At times it even raises questions about whether or not this doomsday scenario is truly unfolding, though we get confirmation through the omniscient narrator that something terrible is indeed happening in the world outside the house: “The next day, or the day after that, certainly the day following that one, some residents of the uppermost apartments in Manhattan would fall into the delirium that presaged their eventual dehydration.” Those moments of zoom-out did not quiet this reader’s urge for the characters to venture forth and see the changed world for themselves. Instead, they pour more drinks, they go for a swim, they bake a cake. What else is there to do when the world is in danger but you’re safe and sound? 
 
Leave the World Behind is an interesting type of apocalypse examination because it focuses on what happens to those removed from the action. Rather than fully examining the ramifications of this strange new world, it looks at the scars from the old world — race, class — that must be confronted in order for these characters to survive in the new. There is a reality that when things fall apart, we want to know why, but this book puts forth the suggestion that the why is irrelevant. What is relevant includes the tiny ways you can reclaim your humanity, even as the gloom of the world presses on your door. Leaving the world behind is an illusion, just like a vacation is an illusion. Reality will catch up, and Alam’s novel examines what people do differently when it does. 
¤ 
<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/elena-sheppard/">Elena Sheppard’s writing has appeared in&nbsp;The New Yorker,&nbsp;The New York Times, and&nbsp;Vogue&nbsp;among numerous other publications. She is an MFA candidate in nonfiction writing at Columbia University.</a>

Rumaan Alam’s “Leave the World Behind” Examines What Happens When You Can’t

<h4>Leo Goldsmith&nbsp;is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. With Rachael Rakes, he&nbsp;edits the film section of the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.brooklynrail.org">Brooklyn Rail&nbsp;</a>and curates film and video at <a href="suncityprojectspace.com">Heliopolis</a> in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.</h4>

Deanne Stillman, "Desert Reckoning"

By LARBAugust 27, 2013

Deanne Stillman is the author of Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango as well as Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave.

Here, she speaks with us about her fascination with the Mojave and her latest book, Desert Reckoning: A Town Sheriff, a Mojave Hermit, and the Biggest Manhunt in Modern California History

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