Knopf
Review by David Starkey
Emily St. John Mandel is one of those increasingly uncommon writers whose work appeals both to a popular and a literary audience. She’s a dab hand at world-building, as readers of her runaway bestseller Station Eleven can attest, and there’s always plenty of action and intrigue in her plots. Yet she’s equally careful about crafting her sentences and developing believable, three-dimensional characters. I, for one, get caught up in her novels in a way that rarely happens when I’m reading other books, and I’ve been waiting for her new effort for a while. I’m happy to say that Exit Party does not disappoint.
St. John Mandel’s previous novel, 2022’s Sea of Tranquility, was concerned with time travel, sometimes confusingly so. Exit Party’s speculative element focuses on alternative universes, but while the nature of these phenomena is mysterious for much of the novel, by the end, everything is satisfactorily explained.
There are a range of characters and character arcs in Exit Party, but the closest thing the book has to a protagonist is Ibari “Ari” Waker, a character first introduced in St. John Mandel’s second novel, The Singer’s Gun. We first meet Ari in Exit Party when she is just a few months out of an eighteen-year-prison sentence for attempting to murder her cousin. The “outside” world she enters is a mess. It’s 2031, and the United States has undergone multiple civil wars. Parts of states, often in conjunction with large cities, have formed their own small republics, with constant low-level violence and ever-shifting borders.
However, the Republic of California has finally found some measure of security and stability, and a friend of Ari’s roommate, Gloria, is throwing a party in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Kareem, the host, is a generous, affable man, but his party quickly goes horribly wrong. Out of nowhere, a duplicate of Gloria, named Nico, appears, along with a duplicate of Saraya, another party-goer, but one whom Ari does not know. One of Kareem’s friends, dumbfounded, remarks that there are too many people at the party, then, in an instant, Kareem himself disappears, never, Ari fears, to be seen again.
No one can figure out what’s happened, but the bedlam from which the many little Americas are fitfully emerging means that the “exit party” doesn’t get the close attention it might under other circumstances. Soon enough, Ari drifts out of LA, ultimately ending up in the Ohio Republic where she’s employed as a low-level criminal doing something resembling detective work. Then her circumstances change drastically, and change yet again. As she says in one aside: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: You get more than one life.”
I’ll do my best not to give away the major plot points, but a glance at the table of contents tells readers that there’s both an A Side and a B Side to this book, and it’s worth describing the B Side.
What would have happened if America hadn’t fallen apart? Surely, stability and order are preferable to chaos and uncertainty. Actually, as George Orwell informed us some decades ago, that’s not the case. The alternative universe in the second half of the book doesn’t have 1984’s air of scuzziness and disfunction. Los Angeles in 2031 is a place where public transportation will quickly and quietly take you just about anywhere you want to go. People are housed in clean and comfortable glass towers. Crime is all but nonexistent. Sounds paradisal, right?
It’s not. Drones hover everywhere, monitoring speech and behavior. Anyone who makes even the least show of resistance to the United State (singular now), is whisked away in an unmarked black vehicle and sent off to a work prison, or worse. The government is all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful. As one character quietly communicates to another, the one thing that “no one tells you about life in an authoritarian state” is “how exhausting it is.”
And dangerous. In the world of Side B, Ibari as she is known here, is less of a central character, although still an important one. She is an undercover operative working for “the Service,” the bureaucracy in charge of controlling thought, speech, and action, along with meting out punishment for transgressors. Ibari is an expert as identifying and disappearing potential dissidents, but in the Service, as in Orwell’s Party—not to mention, St. John Mandel hints, the myriad real-life oppressive governments on planet Earth—everyone is constantly spying on everyone else, and no one, including Ibari, is truly safe.
With the physics of the exit party expounded in some detail, the novel’s final pages are devoted to rounding out the characters’ lives, with a particular focus on the fate of the two Kareems—the gentle soul from Side A and his much less appealing counterpart in Side B. Miraculously, nearly all the loose ends feel tied up by the close, with the sadness that imbues both universes predominant and apparently irreversible.
