EXIT PARTY, by Emily St. John Mandel
These days Americans of varying stripes worry the country faces a perilous future. Could the nation collapse into civil war? Or might it descend into a dystopian authoritarian state? In Emily St. John Mandel’s ambitious and captivating new novel, “Exit Party,” the answer is: maybe both.
“Exit Party” opens in a 2031 Los Angeles after “the United States had come undone following a coup d’état” where states seceded and “war had broken out within the month.” But for now, the fighting is over, the curfew in the Republic of California has been lifted, and people are ready to let loose.
Ari Walker, recently released from prison for attempted murder, joins her roommate Gloria in attending a party at her friend Kareem’s apartment. Gloria is secretly pregnant with Kareem’s child and traumatized by a loyalist suicide bombing that occurred at “a crowded house party” in the early days of the chaos. “When I think about parties, I think about bombs,” she confesses.
Still, the friends go … and then things get odd. Doppelgängers of some guests arrive while Kareem disappears without a trace. A painting, “Swan Dive,” materializes in the middle of the kitchen floor, but while Ari stares, it vanishes, “blinked out of existence.”
These events spawn a series of interlocking mysteries that the novel explores over 300 pages, a century of time and a large cast of characters. It is tricky to summarize this multilayered novel without spoiling the pleasures of its construction, but readers should know that “Exit Party” takes place in two crisscrossing universes with differing dark visions of America’s future. “There was a world where my homeland had fractured into disarray,” one character explains, “and another where my homeland had closed like a fist.”
In timeline A, Ari enters the post-collapse gig economy, taking odd jobs for militias vying for control of the former states. The narrative jumps to the future, where an older and wealthier Ari has settled in the “elite center of Paris” that’s encased in a weather-controlled dome shaped like “a series of giant soap bubbles,” protecting the rich from the ravages of climate change and pandemics. Ari lives a comfortable life as an art collector focused on “Post-Collapse Formalism.” One of her prized pieces is “Swan Dive,” which she purchased from a desperate Gloria. Then one day she is visited by Sebastian, Gloria’s now teenage son, who has come to steal the mysterious painting.
In timeline B, Ibari — Ari’s double — lives a quite different life. Instead of a criminal, she’s a government spy in the Internal Security Service of the authoritarian United State. While other countries in this multiverse “crumbled,” the State survived by knowing that “the difference between mayhem and order is control.” In this future, every neighbor is watching the other and if you attend “pro-democracy demonstrations” you might be turned into “a ghost” no longer “entitled to a home, or health care, or the protections of the law.”
Crafting memorable characters is always a challenge, and Mandel doubles the task for herself with her two timelines. Even so, she succeeds. Her characters are distinct in both worlds as the novel explores how circumstances determine our fates. The novel also sharply renders the psychology of formerly privileged Americans in a world turned, for them, upside down. “I just never wanted to be a part of history,” one party guest laments.
What remains muddier are the two future Americas. Similar to Alex Garland’s film “Civil War” (2024), “Exit Party” avoids discussing politics and ideology even when describing political upheaval and ideological struggle. America A is the product of an unexplained civil war along unclear fault lines. America B is a “surveillance state” of informants meeting in bureaucratic offices that could exist anywhere. Both feel more allegorical than extensions of America’s specific history or its existing internecine and authoritarian tendencies, where partisan allegiances are loudly declared and surveillance is enabled via tech corporations and consumer complicity.
Still, “Exit Party” does so much so well — from tense action sequences to an inventive structure that switches up P.O.V. and form — that the novel will rightly entrance new readers while gripping Mandel’s existing ones. “Exit Party” feels like the culmination of her career so far, combining the thrills and mysteries of the author’s early crime novels with the expansive premises and speculative ruminations of later novels like “Station Eleven.” In addition to thematic connections to her prior books, there are literal ones: Ari Walker is a central character in “The Singer’s Gun” and the painter of “Swan Dive” appears in “The Glass Hotel.”
“If you live long enough,” Gloria’s double says, “you become a migrant from another timeline.” The world we know is always disappearing. “Exit Party” raises important questions about who people are when not just personal but societal circumstances change. Is everyone capable of murder or heroism? Crime or complicity? Despair or rebellion? As the narrator pointedly asks near the novel’s close, “Who will you be at the end of the world?”
EXIT PARTY | By Emily St. John Mandel | Knopf | 301 pp. | $32
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