Should you avoid America right now? This New Yorker says no

Author Rumaan Alam says far from the narrative of being crumbling and crime-ridden, life in the city is vibrant and happy. ‘My children ride the subway to school on their own.’

Author Rumaan Alam: ‘My children ride the subway to school on their own’. Picture: David Land

I was always the kid … with a book. By the time I was eight, I was writing poems and stories. I would always say that I wanted to write a book when I was probably in third, fourth, fifth grade. I was really interested in mysteries. I used to go to the library and check out Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh mysteries, which I couldn’t possibly have understood.

We are at a particular point in human history where … it is hard not to think about the end of the world. Especially when you think about what we have done to the environment. I think of fiction as a place where I can work out my anxieties and worries. I thought putting the idea of the end of the world which preoccupies me into my book Leave the World Behind would get it out of my head, but that hasn’t happened so far.

The most recent thing that has been preoccupying me is … money. We live in a culture obsessed with money. My kids, who are 12 and 15 now, knew even a few years ago who Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk were. They knew who these people were, not because of their business acumen but because of their money, because we live in a culture that valorises money. The extent to which money has colonised our aspirations, our imaginations, our experience of everyday life is really sobering. So I wrote a book about it called Entitlement.

I sometimes try to imagine … aspects of life in which money plays no role. I personally cannot think of one. It’s not really a factor in familial love, but it costs money to care for your elderly parents or to care for your small children. It’s not really a factor in religious faith, the personal spiritual life. But the church, the great churches, are some of the richest institutions on the planet.

I’m hostage to … the system of money that I am describing. I’m not on the outside of it, not a monk living in the wilds of the desert or something, pointing out other people’s fallibility. I participate in this system as much as anyone does, and there are moments that it really bothers me. There are moments in which it doesn’t because money does give us access to tremendous pleasure and beauty.

The Chrysler Building illuminated at sunset in New York City.

Living in New York at the moment is … vibrant and happy. I do think that the right in America wants a narrative that the city is a crumbling and crime-ridden place. That is wholly untrue, and is not what my experience has been at all. My children ride the subway to school on their own.

I would say I’m a … pessimist. I think that suits my work. I’m interested in the novel as a tool for working out my pessimism.

I don’t have a lot of patience for … artists who pathologise their labour. It’s work that has its challenges, but it is not difficult in the way it is difficult to be a nurse or delivering food for a restaurant. Those are difficult jobs.

In this world we need … historians, we need linguists, we need people who care about anthropology, who care about ceramics, things that exist outside the logic of the marketplace. And what is the point of human civilisation really? What is the point? Is it to create products and economic activity, or is it to occasionally land on the sublime. It shouldn’t have a relationship to money.

I imagine travelling to Australia is like … going to another planet where everyone is good looking, it’s always warm and the vegetables are really fresh.

Rumaan Alam appears at Melbourne Writers Festival (8-11 May) and Sydney Writers’ Festival (19-27 May).