Rumaan Alam Writes Entitlement

On the liberties and limits of wealth

Feb 23, 2024

Rumaan Alam has had a big few years. He just finished a new book, due out this fall, called Entitlement, about the billionaire class. His most recent novel, Leave the World Behind, was optioned by the Obamas’ production company and adapted into a movie for Netflix starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Myha’la Herrold, and Mahershala Ali, out last November. Leave the World Behind is a subtle thriller about a white family who rents a home in the Hamptons for a quick summer vacation, and then winds up sheltering there with the home’s Black owners as a vague but devastating crisis —the end of the world?— overtakes the U.S. (The first sign that the world is coming apart is that phones, radio, TV, and Internet all go down at the same time, and the movie apparently had a huge bump yesterday when there were mass cell outages across the U.S.)

One of the things that’s so interesting about the plot of Leave the World Behind is that the apocalypse happens mostly out of frame— the characters are terrified about what seems to be happening elsewhere, knowing that it’s probably coming for them imminently, but at the same time they’re perfectly fine. They’re rich, they’re in a gorgeous house in the Hamptons with more than enough food (and booze), and the weather’s great. Nations are collapsing and people are dying, but the sun is shining where they are.

“It’s a book about reality, about the fact that you don’t ever know what’s going to happen to you, and literally nothing you do can protect you. And that’s such a crazy thing to say, but it’s true. And we all know it. You have to accept it. If you don’t accept it, that’s mental disease, that’s paranoia. You have to live, but you have to make your peace with the profound uncertainty of what it is to live.”

A still from the film adaptation of Leave the World Behind

This is the kind of material Rumaan visits again and again throughout his three (soon to be four) novels: the hypocrisies and anxieties of the moneyed classes, the complexity of interracial intimacies in the United States, politesse as form of the horror genre, and so on. That Kind of Mother, which he published before Leave the World Behind, was about an affluent white single mother who hires a Black nanny, and then finds herself seeking custody of the nanny’s son. His next book, Entitlement, is about a woman who lands a job working for the ultra, ultra rich.

In November, Rumaan came over to my home for a conversation about the fertile creative period that has accompanied his mid-forties, now that his kids are a little older, and the liberty he has felt now that since his books began making enough money for him to quit teaching. The connection between wealth and freedom is something we got into in some detail in this conversation— what having enough money can free you from, and what it can free you to do. We also talk about something his books illustrate so well: that there are things that even money can’t free you from, like anxiety, or climate collapse, or your own mortality.

Listen Now