Somewhere in the second hour of a house party in Los Angeles in the spring of 2031, the host looks across his own living room at a friend in a silver pleated dress, then turns and finds the same woman standing against the wall behind him in shorts and a T-shirt, frightened, asking what city this is. Nobody screams. He decides to be a good host to both of them. The flowers are everywhere, the rain is coming in through the cracked windows, and Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel spends the next three hundred pages working out what that evening cost and who ended up paying for it.
The Rules Emily St. John Mandel Sets
The rules are laid out quickly and never over-explained.
Ari Waker is forty-eight, two months out of an eighteen-year federal sentence, and living in Echo Park with a roommate she knows through a woman she met inside. The United States has come apart after a coup, California is its own republic, and the jacarandas are in bloom. At the party, two guests briefly exist twice and the host disappears between one room and the next. Years later and several collapsing territories away, working surveillance for an Ohio militia, Ari photographs a stranger who has her old roommate’s face and voice, no scar, and a different name.
That is the whole mechanism, and Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel is disciplined about it. There is no chase to reopen the door, no plucky team assembling equipment. There is a physicist who spends decades visiting defrocked academics with theories about objects that exist in two places at once, and a small oil painting called Swan Dive that hangs on a wall in both versions of the world.
The A-Side and the B-Side
The novel is built like a record, and Mandel labels the halves as such.
The A-side belongs to Ari: a dishwashing job, a motel room in Ohio where she sells rifles with a former ballet dancer, a run south through checkpoints, a one-word note delivered by a child outside a Denny’s, and then Paris, where she marries into money and grows old under a glass dome modelled on the weather of the 1990s. The B-side crosses to the other timeline, a United State that never fractured because it closed like a fist instead: exit visas, facial recognition on every doorway, and a detective called Ibari Waker who has Ari’s name, Ari’s childhood and none of her convictions.
The argument running underneath is which catastrophe a person would choose, and the novel refuses to make that easy. Readers who like their quantum mechanics load-bearing will notice that the physics stays deliberately thin. This is a book about the many-worlds interpretation the way The Glass Hotel was a book about finance, which is to say it is interested in the people standing next to the machinery.
The Things Emily St. John Mandel Nails
- The surveillance chapters. Ibari breaks her glasses, repairs them with a strip of silver tape, and discovers that her face no longer resolves for the scanners. What follows is the best sustained writing in Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel: a lifelong rule-follower discovering, in her forties, a small private appetite for crime.
- The economy of the collapse. Six eggs bought at ruinous cost from a family guarding a coop with a rifle. Tents pitched on the roofs of strip malls. A school running in a former TGI Fridays. Mandel never lectures; she prices things.
- Ari as company. She is funny, unsentimental and entirely unrepentant about most of her life, and her premonitions are treated as an irritating utility rather than a gift.
- The backlist rhymes. Anton Waker, Olivia Collins and the Alkaitis name return from The Singer’s Gun and The Glass Hotel. Nothing here requires them, but readers who know those books get an extra floor underneath this one.
Where Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel Gives Ground
Four things keep it from the top shelf of her work.
- The Paris middle drifts. A long section hands the book to a young art thief researching a wealthy collector, and his stakeout is the least urgent hundred pages in the novel.
- Two of the best characters leave early. A gunrunner with a dancer’s discipline and a retired mercenary with a taste for armoured trains both exit just as they become interesting.
- The transcript chapter is a stunt. One section prints only one speaker’s side of three hospital conversations. It is clever, it is borrowed, and it keeps the reader at arm’s length in the exact stretch where warmth was available.
- The A-side knows it is the support act. Once the surveillance state arrives, the picaresque drift of the first half looks thin by comparison, and the book never quite rebalances.
None of that is fatal. Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel remains the most interesting thing she has done since Station Eleven, and the last twenty pages are close to perfect.
Read it if / Skip it if
Read it if you loved the structural braiding of Sea of Tranquility; if you want dystopia written at ground level, in eggs and bus timetables; if you like a protagonist who has done something unforgivable and declines to grovel.
Skip it if you need your speculative premises explained; if a novel that changes protagonist twice sounds exhausting; if you want the door reopened and the ending sealed.
Read These Next
- Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Her best-known collapse, and the closest cousin to the A-side here.
- The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. Shares characters, a painting and a fascination with people who slip out of their own lives.
- The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. For a bureaucracy handling impossible arrivals with forms and a housing allowance.
- The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard. A quieter, stricter book about a border between versions of a life.
- The Book of Lost Hours by Hayley Gelfuso. For readers who want the same questions with more machinery on the page.
The Last Word
The novel ends in a New York studio in 1960, at twenty to four in the morning, where a painter who will be dead within the year is deciding how to break up an expanse of ocean. Not a whole figure. Just a pair of feet going under in the top corner. His rival sleeps on the couch behind him. He is annoyed by her, he needs her opinion, and he knows the way he works will not last.
That small scene is the key to the whole book. Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel is about objects that outlive the people who made them and the countries they were made in, and about how little warning anyone gets before their world is replaced by another one. It drifts in the middle and it declines to explain itself at the end. It is still the novel I have thought about most this year.
