Novelist Rumaan Alam: ‘A lot of people have secret money – it can make you crazy with envy’

Rumaan Alam wrote his first novel between the hours of 7pm and 2am every night. In the mornings, after getting his two boys up for school, he’d grab a nap, spend the day freelancing, fetch the boys and then, reminding his husband, David, not to talk to him after 7pm, he’d write for the entire evening and into the night. Three months later he had a book, then another and then, using the same brutal schedule, a third: Leave the World Behind, which changed everything. “It’s so common for people to talk about children as the death of the creative impulse,” says Alam. “But I really don’t think it is. It’s a spur.”

The 47-year-old is sitting in the cafe of the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan contemplating the weirdness of the last few years of his life. For Alam, there is some guilt attached to the timing of his good fortune; Leave the World Behind, a prescient novel about an apocalyptic event that maroons a bunch of affluent New Yorkers in the Hamptons, came out just as the pandemic hit. It was a huge instant bestseller, catching the moment but also transcending it, and was shortly followed by a movie adaptation for Netflix starring Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali. “It was such a terrible year for almost everybody, and it happened to be one of the best years of my career,” says Alam. “What could I do except be thrilled?” Plus, he points out, smiling, there was the extra, pandemic-era frisson of being happy, simply, that “we weren’t dead and could still have a livelihood”.

Alam’s writing is loose-limbed, expertly observed, flying along with the engine of a commercial novel and the fine eye of a literary one. He is slyly funny, on the page and in person, sensitive to the absurdities of life in general and the New York class system in particular. In Leave the World Behind, a bougie white Brooklyn family must navigate their own biases when the wealthy Black owners of their rented house show up on the doorstep, in flight from an unspecified cataclysm. In his new novel, Entitlement, Alam captures the experience of living in a city so wildly unaffordable that it bends all those without a trust fund out of shape. Brooke, a Manhattanite in her early 30s, gets a job working for a billionaire’s charitable foundation and – as many in the city do – finds herself disastrously adopting his lifestyle without the funds to pay for it. It’s about self-delusion, and magical thinking, and a city that values money above most other things.

It is also a book about waiting. With the exception of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, the typifying New York novel tends to characterise the city purely in terms of energy and hustle. Cleverly, Alam posits an opposing view. Entitlement is set during the first Obama administration in what Alam characterises as “a more innocent time”, when rents were (slightly) cheaper and the city was easier “to romanticise”. In his New York, Brooke and her friends are all waiting – for their fortunes to change; for their big moments to arrive; for something, anything to happen.

Above all, of course, they are waiting for money – “this metric for everything”, as Alam says, and that in Brooke’s case takes the shape of her hunger to own an apartment. “In American life, that was the abiding dream, and it is very powerful, even in New York City,” says Alam. “You might not want a white picket fence, but you want a piece of the thing, and that’s the result of decades and decades of cultural programming.” Even 15 years ago, a woman in Brooke’s position, in a well-respected but not highly paid job, could not remotely afford to buy a home in the city. And so, says Alam, “that tradition of looking for security, at this point in American life, is delusional. The only way to write about it is as a mania.”

Alam himself came to the city in his early 20s, straight out of college. He grew up in Washington DC, the son of two doctors and first-generation immigrants from Bangladesh, or as he puts it, “very traditional south Asian, immigrant, middle-class parents. Upper middle-class when I was growing up, and middle-class now.” (Doctors’ wages in the US have been dwarfed by those of tech and finance workers.)

His parents wanted him to enter a profession. He wanted to be a writer. “Magazine publishing was my realistic immigrant child compromise,” he says. While still a student at Oberlin College, a chance encounter at a party resulted in Alam getting a job as an assistant at Condé Nast, the kind of entry-level position usually reserved for nepo babies or trust fund kids, and he is very funny about the time he spent there. This was the last hurrah of the magazines, an era that, by today’s standards, looks avant garde in its excess. “One of my tasks was to do the boss’s expenses. So she’d rifle through her wallet and pull out every piece of paper, and be like ‘figure this out’. I’d just write, like, ‘magazine’ or ‘coffee’ on the top. And you’d take it upstairs to this teller, and slide it under, and she’d glance at it and count out the cash. I would always be going upstairs to get $200 reimbursement. Then I would do the full expenses from her corporate Amex, which was the hotels, and the clothing allowance.”

Alam, who was 22 at the time, could have been living in a Tom Wolfe novel, surrounded by money and its signifiers. For a young man who hadn’t grown up in New York, it took a minute to recognise the subtext when someone mentioned they’d “been to Brearley” (the poshest girls’ school in the city), or kept referring to “their mother’s house”. Trying to figure out who had money was, he says, like “looking for water underground”, and Alam found it fascinating. “There’s a lot of secret money,” he says. “If you’re a certain kind of person and go to a certain college and enter a certain profession, you realise there are these secret layers of money and pedigree informing other people’s lives. And once you’ve realised that, it can make you crazy with envy, or frustration.”

As an observation, this was a starting point for Entitlement, as was the cold eye Alam turned on the changing fortunes of that particular scene. When the magazine world started to tank in 2008, a lot of the women who had used it as a kind of “finishing school” had to look elsewhere. Some got their real estate licences. Many, as in Alam’s novel, went into “interior design”. And some “became consultants, or life coaches, which I just think is so funny, because – I don’t know what they know about life. ”

The other impetus for the novel was the experience Alam recently went through of watching his children, Simon and Xavier, enter their teenage years in the city. “My older son did say to me, not long ago: why don’t we have a country house?” His kids go to state school, but the family lives in an affluent neighbourhood of Brooklyn where plenty of people disappear to the Hamptons in the summer. On one level, says Alam, “that’s a ludicrous thing he said”, and he batted it easily away. On the other hand, he says, there can be vast disparities in the income of families within, for example, a single school setting. “If you’re a kid with a parent who works as a New York City subway conductor, which I’m sure is a great job, and you find yourself in a school where film stars go … I don’t know how you straddle that.”

Thing is, I suggest, you probably could afford a country house at this point.

Alam smiles. “Sure. Maybe. We’ll see how this book does.”

***

It wasn’t always like this. Alam and his husband had their kids in their early 30s, when money was tight. David is a freelance photographer. Alam had left magazines and was working as a freelance copywriter. When he took 11 weeks off and tried to bang out a first draft of the novel that would become Rich and Pretty, it was a financially perilous move. By the time he finished the book, he was so strapped for cash he was “paying the babysitter in coins. It got dicey there for a moment. But on we go.”

Throughout the production of those first novels, Alam found the experience of having young children incredibly galvanising. “A lot of unnecessary things fell away,” he says. “I was really able to focus in a different way. I focused on them, and I focused on the novel.” Occasionally, as parents do, he wonders: “What was I doing in the decade before I had children? It’s not like I was getting laid. I was just sitting around. Watching TV?”

I’m curious about his decision to set Leave the World Behind in a straight family. Novels don’t have to reflect the life situation of the author, of course, but it was an interesting choice by a writer in a two-dad household to focus on, in particular, the mother of the family. “Well, in some ways it was easier to see [them] with some clarity,” says Alam. He makes the comparison to one of his favourite writers, Anita Brookner, and how she wrote about the English. In some ways, for Alam, straight couples and their lives are another country, just as England was for Brookner, “a strange, isolated, Jewish daughter of eastern European refugees writing about real London; real fussy British society. Really taking apart all these aspects of English life at the time. And I bet she was better able to see it because she wasn’t part of it.”

As a gay dad, Alam turned a critical eye on what he calls “the most conventional parts of heterosexual society, which is in the playground, and the PTA, and the afterschool. And of course I spend most of my time in those circles with the moms. I feel like I really understand – I really watch.” One of his observations was the extent to which even the most liberal families cleave to conventional gender dynamics. “My circle is as progressive as it gets,” says Alam. “And I’m often shocked by how gendered and straight their lives are. You know; dad takes out the garbage, or dad plays golf,” while mom helps out at the PTA.

And then there is the role played in these circles by money. Initially, Alam’s editor suggested he make the heroine of Entitlement poor. But that didn’t work. It had to be about someone who had enough, but wanted more. Not only does Brooke think, vaguely, and with the surety of someone whose needs have always been met, that things will “work out”, but she is consumed by the need to have more. “The people I know who talk the most about money have no real experience of privation, and probably won’t,” says Alam.

He is talking about classic, middle-class rat race thinking: if we just got into a better postcode, the kids could go to a better school, with a better social setting, and then get into a better college. “And then if we can make $300k a year more easily, we could buy them a starter home.” (It’s telling that in many New York private schools, some element of financial aid is available to families earning less than $450k a year.) And of course these are currents to which Alam and his husband are not themselves immune.

Thanks to the success of Leave the World Behind, his own financial situation has vastly improved. But, says Alam, his new reality has had its surreal moments. For example, the family was in a rental house on Fire Island at the height of the pandemic when the film deal with Netflix and Higher Ground, the Obamas’ production company, was going through. “We were holed up in this house, we weren’t seeing anybody, we were just going to the beach. And I would have these Zoom conference calls with Julia Roberts and Sam Esmail’s producers and the studios, in a bathing suit, while the kids were running around. None of it felt real.”

His last novel may have tapped into our thirst for apocalyptic settings, but Entitlement imagines another worst-case scenario for many New Yorkers – that of running out of money and being banished to the suburbs. “It’s funny to me that to a certain class that is a fate worse than death,” says Alam. “Which is obviously crazy.”

The book’s opening line is a conscious nod to The Bell Jar. “The Bell Jar is about a lot of things. It’s about the experience of real medical emergency. Right? But the book also shows that derangement might be the most logical response to the condition of being a woman in postwar America.” In Entitlement, Brooke is similarly deranged, Alam says. “But maybe derangement is the most logical response to the conditions of contemporary life.”

• Entitlement by Rumaan Alam will be published by Bloomsbury on 17 September. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.