Leave the World Benign

An exercise in mediocracy

Just heard of this thriller being made into a film starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington called Leave the World Behind. 

The book came out in 2020, but was hardly a cultural smash. I’m attuned to this sector and had never heard of it. 

Compare this to The Pelican Brief which film adaptation featured these same two mega stars: knowledge of that novel was much more widespread (in an era of slower media too) before the film was even made.

On Amazon, Leave the World Behind (sounds like a bad Bond title) has a 3.6 rating from 15k reviews and ratings. That’s abysmal for a supposed “marvel” of a novel, one that made Obama’s Must Read list (paid promotion?), and praised with gushing ineffectiveness by the usual serfs within the formerly critical publishing apparatus.

The synopsis doesn’t compel interest either: it’s a white couple who vacations to Long Island when the power goes out, and they have to (presumably) contend with the black couple who own the rental and claim to have fled the city because of the outages. Will they trust each other enough to be “safe from one another”?

Race difference is the reason for the distrust, of course. Are all four of these bougie Americans that shallow (and racist? All four?) that they can’t discern character by behavior, only by race? It’s laughably insipid.

This is your hook for a thriller?

It has an even lower 3.2 rating on Goodreads with over 120k ratings. 

This is not an organically successful novel. It wasn’t widely read, but, by those who did read, it was summarily critiqued for mediocrity.

This was a pushed novel. A DEI trophy, hoping to force a hit by playing on the hesitation to properly criticize a “brown” person.

The author is Rumaan Alam, a Bangladeshi American, a qualified token of the movement. But can he write?

The first sentence starts with exclamatory “Well” (So, you see) and reuses it immediately, modifying the opening predicament (“boded well”). Here’s the full sentence:

“Well, the sun was shining. They felt that boded well—people turn any old thing into an omen.”

You mean like hackneyed novelists? The normalcy of the weather “bodes. . . indifference” here and indicates nothing unique enough for fiction, especially an opening. (And I’m not sure what the dash is meant to be: a colon? A period? There appears to be three sentences.)

There is no intrigue. Just mediocre platitudes. Who’d be snagged by that?

Contrast this with my 2019 novel about mass shootings, No Winter Lasts Forever, that also opens with a fine climate: “Normal day; perfect weather. April—relative present.” But the normalcy is immediately contrasted by “three college-aged men in masks” with “guns jammed in their waistbands” approaching a high school.

A more harrowing subject, to be sure. Compelling, even. It’s a tragic thriller after all. But people have been cowed by the enervations in the courage of the industry only a deliberately mediocre ideological arts establishment could produce.

People are afraid of my book.

That does not bode well.

No Winter Lasts Forever has a 4.1 and 4.2 rating on Amazon and Goodreads, respectively. But you’ll never see it made into a film. 

The mediocracy would forbid it.