(typewriter clacking) (bell ringing) - [Rumaan] Hi, I'm Rumaan Alam and this is Leave the World Behind, a novel about a family on vacation, but it's also a novel about all of us in the moment that we live in right now.

(gentle music) - [Mary Laura] Would say that you designed this book to operate within multiple genres at once, or to sort of defy genre altogether?

- So, when people talk about genre, what you usually are hearing readers say is stuff about the thriller and the way that the book has a momentum or stuff about horror and the way in which the book is reliant on fright.

What you hear less of, or what I have heard less of, is the way in which literary fiction is itself a genre and that the biggest genre I'm working with is actually a literary fiction because I'm taking the conventions of whiteness, of middle-class respectability, of people who care about their professional life, of people who are negotiating their sex with relation to their professional ambition, who are thinking about what it is to be a parent, who are thinking about what it is to be a spouse.

These are the conventions of the literary novel, as practiced by basically every literary writer we could name in this country.

To me, that suggests that that is more codified than people are willing to allow, that just as horror relies on like the jump fright or just as the murder mystery relies on revealing who the killer is, literary fiction relies on these things, too.

And so, I was having a lot of fun with those conventions.

- How does this reflect your view of human nature?

- I think that the people in this book who are faced with real uncertainty about what's happening outside of this house spend a lot of time focused on things that are immaterial.

What the people do in this book strikes me as a lot of what we have done in this society, which is talk and talk and talk, and fail and fail and fail, and also consume and consume.

Like, they're trapped in this house, they don't know what's happening to them, and their response is to eat all of the food and drink all of the alcohol.

- For more of my conversation with Rumaan Alam, visit awordonwords.org and keep reading.

(bell ringing) - [Rumaan] Family life to me is like the emotional on ramp to a text for any reader.

We are all a part of a family.

It doesn't matter how you choose to define that.