Page 82 - Sharp Spring 2021
P. 82

 BOOKS
    Alone Together
Toronto author and filmmaker Marlowe Granados speaks
to Rumaan Alam about his un- cannily prophetic disaster novel, Leave the World Behind by MARLOWE GRANADOS
makes you a bad person or an unlikeable character to have a fleeting self-aware thought that’s racist or sexist or whatev- er. People do it all the time.
The idea of likeable characters feels so dry. There’s this urge to need likeable characters in novels in order for readers to latch onto them.
I’m not sure that novels ought to aspire to a feeling of reality, because they’re not real. I think there’s a certain kind of artificial quality to fiction that we sometimes try to pretend doesn’t exist. I think that we do ourselves a disser- vice. In terms of whether you care about the character or not, I find that the most pernicious way of talking about fiction. It’s really crept into the cultural conversation.
Don’t you think that this line of cri- tique is so particular to literature? No one cares if the same is true for TV shows or films.
Absolutely. In fact, we’ve valorized television that is about bad people. All of prestige television is just television about people who are terrible.
I wonder if it’s because you’re more
in someone’s head in a way you can’t replicate in other media. If it doesn’t match up to how someone sees the world, there must be something wrong with the novel.
Yes. Absolutely. It’s like [this viewpoint] prioritizes the reader’s experience of the world and says, “Is this correct or incor- rect?” Rather than taking the book as it is and saying, “Well, obviously this is not real. Obviously, it’s pretend.”
You’re making something, you’re building a construction to make a point. If readers want to reject that because it’s too outlandish or this would never happen or whatever, then they misun- derstand what it is to read a book.
I try to talk about writing as you would talk about fine art. A person who’s an artist started out by learning how to draw silhouettes and shadows, in the same way the writer learns to construct sentences, but afterwards you’re sup- posed to diverge and go off into your own style.
Absolutely. There’s no power to Rothko or Pollock without an ability to un- derstand that Pollock and Rothko also
82 SHARPMAGAZINE.COM
SPRING 2021
RUMAAN ALAM’S THIRD NOVEL, to acknowledge that. I don’t think it
Leave the World Behind, is a
timely example of how we cling to the rituals of domesticity in times of chaos. A Brooklyn family has gone for a summer vacation to a remote house on Long Island. For the first hot, languid day the family settles in, Alam’s prose is noticeably rich — a tool he says is meant to unsettle the reader. Late one night,
a knock at the door brings two strangers with news of an unknown catastrophe that has caused the Internet, phones, and cable to go down. As days go by,
the family must integrate with these strangers — a thoroughly contemporary examination of class, race, and how we navigate survival without technology. The once-charming and rustic house becomes the perfect environment for a kind of claustrophobic paranoia to set in.
From his home in Brooklyn, Alam and I discussed the current state of liter- ature, heroism, and technology.
MG: The most remarkable part of reading Leave the World Behind was the way you developed all the characters, and the use of the omniscient narrator, so the reader knows what everyone’s thinking. How were you able to create a distinct voice for each character?
RA: For the first several drafts of the book, the reader was watching them from a remove, and my editor said it was annoying because the characters don’t know what’s happening and neither does the reader. The solution was to change the perspective so that the reader knows everything that’s happening, and every- one’s interior thoughts. I wanted to work in that way where the story knew all the information and just wasn’t sharing [all of] it with the reader or with the charac- ters. It’s something I came to in revision. I think five or six drafts into the book.
I loved the way the characters gave into thoughts that they felt guilty about. “Maybe this is racist. Maybe this is something I shouldn’t be thinking.”
We lose out on that a lot of the time because we want characters to have a certain type of politics or to be...good people. I think that’s so untrue to life. People think ugly things. They think bad things. It’s part of being alive and
part of being in a society. Yes, people are flawed. I see people negotiate with that all the time. It’s just part of the bargain of being a human, and I think it’s okay







































































   80   81   82   83   84