In every one of Emily St. John Mandel’s novels, there’s someone on the verge of leaving. We meet them on a precipice, drawn to the idea of escape — whether from a lackluster relationship or a fulfilling one; whether in pursuit of a concrete concept of a different life or just the hope of one. It’s fitting, then, that her newest novel, her seventh, is titled Exit Party, and that the thing being escaped has grown quite drastically in scale — it’s our universe itself.
Mandel has often woven her novels into each other, building a Mandelverse of sorts. Readers of her work can spend an afternoon mapping out the web of connections between her books, finding recurrences of both character and theme. Exit Party explicitly links Mandel’s early work, The Singer’s Gun, with her later novels, both The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility. A character, Ari Waker, plays a minor but pivotal role in The Singer’s Gun. We meet her again in Exit Party.
In Exit Party, we find ourselves in a splintered, near-future America. No longer the United States, and with the Republic of California newly independent, Los Angeles is a city celebrating small and big joys in the wake of violence. Ari Waker is fresh out of prison and on her way to a party with her roommate. But there’s something uncanny at this party: there seem to be doubles of some people, who disappear around corners and out of Ari’s line of sight, disoriented and disorienting in equal measure. We then follow Ari across decades, as she moves to Europe, reinvents herself, and marries thrice, but still remains doggedly haunted by the mysteries of that party.
The mysteries are slowly revealed. The doubles are visitors to our universe, stepping through from a parallel one. “I think the party was … a door,” a character says. Exit Party takes us through the door, too. In the first part, “Side A”, we remain in Ari’s universe, but partway through the novel, we are invited into “Side B”: into an alternate, markedly different America, where we meet, among many other characters, an alternate-universe Ari.
There are a lot of characters and ideas in this novel, and it’s to Mandel’s credit that Exit Party is very readable, a literary page-turner if there ever was one. But at times, I found myself bogged down rather than impressed by the novel’s scope. In a way, it felt too layered. One of its central themes (as with most parallel universe stories — notably Under Story by Chloe Benjamin, also releasing this September) is the What If. What if I lived in an alternate universe? What if I had a different job? What if I had missed the bus that pivotal morning? With an alternate universe, you have the opportunity to confront the What If head-on.
Ari’s curiosity about her double is understandable and relatable. But even just in Side A, we’ve already encountered almost five different versions of Ari — and for those of us who’ve read The Singer’s Gun, even more. She moves from criminal to convict to free soul to art dealer to married woman to philanthropist. She changes like a chameleon, goes by many names, reinvents herself with each marriage. Some of her chapters are in third person, others in first person. “You get more than one life,” she thinks. When we meet her counterpart in Side B, who goes by Ibari, she’s a version of Ari that’s made drastically different choices — and I can’t help but feel the dissonance would be stronger, more powerful, perhaps more effective if Ari wasn’t already so slippery in Side A. If she’s already living five different lives in the span of one lifetime, what’s yet another one?
At times, Mandel’s insistence on creating intertextuality between her own novels can feel a touch too strong. Could Ari have been her own character, instead of a recurrence from The Singer’s Gun, with a criminal past that is mostly only hinted at in Exit Party? A painting featured prominently in this novel comes from a minor character in The Glass Hotel — aside from a shiver of recognition, what effect would this have on Mandel’s fans, or on a reader new to her work? In Side B, the State uses passphrases that felt vaguely familiar, only for me to realize they are possibly paraphrased from Mandel’s own The Singer’s Gun and The Glass Hotel, or indeed from Side A itself. It’s interesting to read these echoes from universe to universe, but I was left wondering what some of the references actually achieved, beyond building another node on that web.
And then there is the reality of the two worlds. When we enter Side A, we’re already in speculative territory, in a broken America. Side B takes us to the other extreme — a hyper-politicized and united State. The two extremities, Ibari realizes: “There was a world where my homeland had fractured into disarray, and another where my homeland had closed like a fist.” It’s an interesting act of worldbuilding, but at times the message threatens to overwhelm the story. It can feel heavy-handed and clunky: for instance, a plaque that reads “following the disastrous experiment […] the State had taken control of every university”. In Side B, we’re in a world where state surveillance is so normalized that no one even considers it a violation, and we follow Ibari as she slowly realizes another way of living. But for this reader, that journey felt slightly lackluster: like it deserved the focus of its own book, perhaps. Moving from Ari’s chaotic world to Ibari’s surveillance state, which requires a decent suspension of disbelief (surely you would question this level of surveillance a little, even if you’d never known another world?), feels too unwieldy for one novel. I couldn’t help but think of Station Eleven, where one half of the story remains rooted in a recognizable world, and we read the novel with the knowledge that that world will slowly unravel. In Exit Party, I wonder if there was a more effective middle ground.
There is much that Exit Party does very well. Mandel is at her best in intimate moments, in her observations of relationships, and in her careful portraits of character motivations. A lovely thread about parenting — bad parents, found family — winds its way through Exit Party. Some of my favorite lines and images are about the titular party itself: the idea of a party as a door, or this line: “I was in the other place, then there was a feeling like plucking the string of a guitar, but I was the string.” Mandel loves to write novels with many, many characters, but she always takes care to anchor them in detail, which makes them feel three-dimensional in a way rarely afforded to your average side character. There is a level of attention paid to her characters that shines through, no matter the scale and scope of the story being told. But while the moments of intimacy shine in Exit Party, they take place in more muddled worldbuilding than in her previous novels.
Mandel has played with scale before, most notably in her speculative novels Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility — the former set partly in a post-apocalyptic America, and the latter featuring time travel, a colony on the moon, and the simulation hypothesis. In Station Eleven, despite the setting, the worldbuilding is backseated in favor of its characters — the novel is expansive, but more so for its sprawling cast than for its concept. The book is underpinned by a feeling: a deep sense of loss. A chapter early on in the novel just lists the things that no longer exist in the new world: “No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below […] No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows […] No more countries, all borders unmanned.”
Sea of Tranquility, her sixth novel, is set across multiple timelines, from 1912 to 2020 to 2400; yet it remains stripped down, takes place mostly in a recognizable reality, and narrows its focus to a smaller cast of characters. In contrast, Exit Party suffers under the weight of too many strands — it must set up two believable worlds, both different from our own; it juggles a large cast of characters; and it lacks some of the thematic focus of her previous novels. At the time of their respective releases, Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility felt like they were doing something rare for literary fiction, in either theme or style; with Exit Party, though, Mandel is hardly the first to write about a fractured American future, or of the twenty-first century surveillance state.
In the lead-up to Exit Party, I revisited Mandel’s work. I mapped the connections between books and characters and noted recurring themes and preoccupations. Exit Party feels like a culmination of so many of the interests and concerns that come up in Mandel’s oeuvre: an emphasis on the importance of our choices, a reminder of the power of art in a splintered world, an elegy in the wake of various kinds of loss, an appeal to humanity’s interconnectedness across time, space, universes. It is a joy to read a writer who can look at similar questions from different angles, shifting her focus from the intimate to the large, then back to the intimate again. In Exit Party, Mandel’s gone as large as she’s ever been. I hope she goes smaller next time.
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