“Running away from that is an abnegation of parental responsibility”-a theme explored in his last book, That Kind of Mother. “Telling the kids about the news feels like an act of child abuse not telling the kids about the news does too,” the writer tweeted on May 29, a few days before taking his sons, who are Black, to a family-friendly protest along Prospect Park West.įor Alam-born to Bangladeshi parents, married to a white man-there’s a “responsibility to raise Black people in a society with a full awareness of the implications of their Blackness,” he said. Inside his own home, color-saturated and upbeat, the mood is in sync with the times. (He includes Jenny Offill’s Weather and Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible in the category of recent books that presciently hit upon this “register of discomfort.”) Alam's novel centers on a family whose “vacation runs headlong into a moment of global crisis, but they are inside a house in sort of an isolated part of Long Island, unaware of what’s happening in the world,” he explained. Leave the World Behind-distinct from the disaster literature that will follow this godforsaken year-was conceived before COVID-19, somehow reading the room before infrared forehead thermometers arrived to do it for us. An exhale from late May: “Should I start taking cocaine I mean I almost fell asleep in the shower and now I have to read the bedtime story which is basically like swallowing ten ambien anyway just complaining!!”Īlam, tartly perceptive on social media and lyrically so in his novels, has a third book due this fall.
His Twitter feed, if not his productivity, is better for it. Land, have been mastering the art of improvisation in quarantine, figuring out how to keep two boys (the older one, Simon, is 10) occupied while their careers carry on-Alam’s, by necessity, mostly at night. Alam and his husband, photographer David A. I heard him whisper to 7-year-old Xavier, begging a five-minute reprieve. “I'm very busy right now making a Game of Thrones dragon for my younger son,” he said brightly, calling from his Brooklyn apartment. Rumaan Alam, a novelist and contributing editor at The New Republic, had his hands full this week.
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