Emily St. John Mandel is a novelist celebrated for, among other things, her prescience. Station Eleven, her best-known novel, was published in 2014. When the pandemic hit globally in 2020, critics and readers began to remark on how Station Eleven anticipated the pandemic, given that its dystopian plot is set in motion by the outbreak of a worldwide virus.
Let's hope that Mandel's gift for writing prophetic fiction is overrated, because her latest novel, Exit Party, opens with this set-up: "In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, ..."
Fortunately, for all its darkness, Exit Party lights plenty of signal fires along the shore to keep readers open to possibilities that may lie ahead. The plot here, like the plots in the previous three Mandel novels I've read, is ingenious, eerie and complex; but not so complex it dampens curiosity. Here's the briefest of teasers:
In the spring of 2031, a 48-year-old woman named Ari, recently released after 18 years in prison, goes to a party in Los Angeles with her roommate, Gloria. The Los Angeles they live in is an anxious place, given the violence of recent history. We're told that:
The United States had come undone following a coup d’etat. Several states had seceded within a week of the coup ... and war had broken out within the month. Now the fighting had subsided, for the most part, and Ari had been released into an uneasy aftermath.
The occasion for the party is this new relative peace in the city; but, as the two women and others sense: "There's something wrong with the party." It has "extra people" because some guests seem to be duplicating themselves. Toward the end of this peculiar evening, the host, a sweet man named Kareem, enters his kitchen (which doesn't have an outside door) and disappears forever. Years later, another attendee confides to Ari: "I think the party was also a door."
Without giving too much away, I'll also say that the doppelgänger theme extends, not just to people, but also to a country. There's another United States in this novel, one that's riven, not by militias and fortified state borders, but, rather, one that's been suffocated into a tranquil surveillance state where, we're told, "voting was no longer required and the president would one day be succeeded by his son." A character (who's grown up in this alternative U.S., but is now beginning to doubt its legitimacy) tells us that: "The thing about living in a place like this was how hard you had to work to not see the obvious."
Mandel knows she doesn't have to belabor her topical social commentary: It's of an unsettling piece with everything else that's packed into the three parts of this capacious novel. For instance, there's a subplot about a painting that reappears in locales across time and space. The painting is entitled "Swan Dive" and it depicts a pair of feet disappearing into a dark ocean. Not the most reassuring of images.
Exit Party also unexpectedly veers into an action-escape adventure in which Ari must figure out how to get herself and a partner out of the U.S two steps ahead of a gun smuggling cartel they've ripped off. Admittedly, a little of the energy goes out of Exit Party when tough, resilient Ari leaves center stage; but, maybe there's comfort in Mandel's weird and arresting vision here of a universe in which time is porous and people are duplicated in somewhat altered form.
In such a universe, maybe another America is waiting to be born, too.
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