Emily St. John Mandel writes science fiction, with the accent firmly on fiction. Imagination, not technical verisimilitude, is her strength; she wisely disregards the scientific in favor of the human. Her indifference to plausibility is a measure of her confidence as a storyteller, and helps snare readers like me, who have a mild allergic reaction to postapocalyptic settings and outer-space odysseys. Her previous novel featured time travel, interplanetary travel, and a cosmic glitch; now, in her challenging new novel, Exit Party, we have accidental teleportation between parallel universes. The underlying theme, though, is irresistible: how shockingly little humanity understands about the sudden swerves and reversals that shape a life—or end it. The new book also offers a prescient invitation to consider the human toll that a world of chaos or repression can exact.
Exit Party’s stunning first sentence leaps ahead to 2031 and peeks into a woman’s soul: “In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace.” Newly released after 18 years in prison, 48-year-old Ari Waker is just getting used to a Los Angeles that has seen vicious internecine violence. Although international peacekeeping troops have been withdrawn and the city’s curfew has been lifted, nothing like normalcy prevails. Ari walks with her roommate from their apartment in Echo Park (note the locale) to a party in Silver Lake. There, the incomprehensible happens: Two people from a parallel world materialize at the party, and another person (the host) is teleported in the opposite direction—all by accident.
The inexplicable appearances and disappearances are as disorienting for the reader as they are for Ari, who wonders whether she has a brain tumor or is having a stroke. For the three teleported individuals, the experience is a disaster: instant, complete, and irreversible dislocation. In the alternate universe, we soon learn, the “United State” has become a fortress, “closed like a fist,” where the national doctrine is “Harmony at any cost.” There we encounter, among other characters, Ibari, an enforcer of the brutally repressive social order.
Abrupt cataclysm is a signature of Mandel’s recent work. Before Exit Party came Sea of Tranquility (2022), The Glass Hotel (2020), and Station Eleven (2014)—all of them ingeniously splintered narratives involving many protagonists, zigzagging timelines, and some kind of shattering event. It’s never clear until the end that the shards of narrative can be assembled to form a coherent story. The big picture that at last emerges in Exit Party features paired life stories of doppelgängers, genetically identical sets of characters who have made decisions in their divergent worlds that move them along radically different paths. Ari and Ibari are the principal “twins.” Though at first they seem utterly dissimilar, they are, as Ibari recognizes late in the novel, “two sides of the same coin.”
Repeatedly drawn to criminality (which she associates with freedom), Ari has had more than her share of “hinge moments,” the term she prefers for dramatic, world- and life-changing twists. She launched one criminal enterprise—selling luxury goods bought with stolen credit-card numbers—as a teenager, while living in Brooklyn with an aunt and uncle who dealt in stolen antiques. Soon enough, helped out by her cousin, she was selling U.S. passports. When the Russian Mafia lured her into smuggling people, her cousin, beset by moral qualms, balked. So she hired an assassin to kill him. That’s how she landed in prison.
Sprung from jail and hoping to find her footing, Ari drifts instead. She works as a dishwasher and in warehouses, and then becomes, in dizzying succession, a gunrunner, a trophy wife, a philanthropist, an art collector. Arriving in Paris in a car with bulletproof windows (another hinge moment), she wonders, “How many completely separate lives am I going to get to live before I run out of chances.” Mandel makes this resilient character—a serial transgressor with a pragmatic code of ethics, uncannily accurate premonitions, and a touching capacity for regret—sympathetic and compelling. Her last name, Waker, is a clue to her essence: She’s awake, aware. She will always notice the jacarandas.
A meticulous observer by profession, Ibari is 79 when we meet her, and has risen to a high rank in the Internal Security Service. She’s as frank about her complicity in the disappearance of rule-breaking fellow citizens as Ari is about her weakness for criminality. Ibari has nonetheless imagined a scenario in which, instead of running surveillance operations for the State, she became a criminal; like her twin, she felt there would be “freedom in that.”
The door that swings open at the party remains thereafter obdurately shut. Appalled, puzzled, fascinated, Ari and Ibari (in their parallel worlds) try their best to comprehend what has happened. They investigate, quizzing the accidentally teleported. Eventually, they (and the befuddled reader) learn enough about each other and the different worlds they inhabit to have some thoughts about “entanglement”—about how doubles in their respective universes intersect. Which they do, eerily. Even before she knows anything about Ibari and her career in the secret police, Ari wonders why she herself hadn’t “just become a detective, instead of turning to crime.” She can see the appeal of a life played out in the ranks of the NYPD. She yearns for a homeland where she would be spared the “permanent unease” of encroaching anarchy, where armed fighters aren’t forever shooting at one another on the edge of town.
In Exit Party, those who diverge nearly converge, and every echo resonates.
When they were young girls, Ari and Ibari each read the same children’s detective novel and both latched on to the same sentence: “True diligence means following the improbable path.” While in prison, Ari had TRUE DILIGENCE tattooed on her left wrist; to judge from the improbable path that Ari and Ibari’s creator has followed, it’s Mandel’s motto too.
After growing up in western Canada, mostly homeschooled, Mandel graduated in 2000 from the School of Toronto Dance Theatre. Nine years later, at 30, having abandoned her dream of dancing professionally, she published her debut novel. Like her next two books, it was a noir thriller; all three slipped by more or less unnoticed. Her fourth, Station Eleven, about a flu pandemic “that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth,” killing almost every human, won prizes and much-deserved critical praise, and sold remarkably well—before getting a big bump six years later during COVID. Sales of the book passed the 1 million mark shortly after the first episode of an HBO adaptation aired, in late 2021.
Station Eleven was Mandel’s own hinge moment. In addition to introducing what has since become her fiction’s hallmark fracturing of time and lives, the novel displayed her calm authority and her easy way with ambitious imaginative gambits—one world erased, another fighting to be born—carried off with barely a trace of writerly flourish: “The caravans had once been pickup trucks, but now they were pulled by teams of horses on wheels of steel and wood.” In Mandel’s work, unadorned realism is at the service of baroque invention, and everything, including the prose, is subordinate to the story.
Like all the best stories, hers are character-driven. In Station Eleven, Kirsten Raymonde, a child actor before the pandemic and afterward a skilled warrior, is canny and resourceful in the face of catastrophe. Eight years old when her familiar world ended, and a semi-feral teenager when she hooked up with a ragtag troupe that stages Shakespeare plays and orchestral concerts, Kirsten is permanently traumatized, ferocious when necessary, and somehow still capable of tenderness. She’s a sturdy hook for the reader.
Mandel holds tight to some of her characters: She teleports a few between the parallel worlds of her novels. Ari made her debut in The Singer’s Gun (2010), where she was already mercilessly pragmatic and minimally sentimental. An important prop in the new novel is a painting by a minor but vivid character in The Glass Hotel, Lucas Alkaitis, a heroin-addicted artist, talented and doomed, “on the run from mediocrity and Brylcreem and grey flannel suits.” Lucas himself also reappears, still an addict, still committed to his art, in a curious coda to Exit Party set in his Manhattan studio in 1960—a final, wrenching narrative swerve.
In Sea of Tranquility, you’ll find a Mandel stand-in: a newly famous writer in the year 2203 who has left her moon-colony home for planet Earth to embark on a globe-spanning book tour. Separated from her family, she finds herself unmoored, homesick. An interviewer in Estonia asks her what it’s like to have published a tremendously successful book. She answers, “I wrote three books that no one noticed, no distribution beyond the moon colonies, and then … it’s like slipping into a parallel universe.” She continues, “I somehow fell into a bizarre upside-down world where people actually read my work. It’s extraordinary. I hope I never get used to it.”
One of the projects of modernism (and postmodernism) is to unsettle our confidence in the coherence of the self and thereby reveal the truth about our disjointed identity, so often sabotaged by an unruly unconscious. The so-called neomodernist novelist Rachel Cusk has declared that she is “not interested in character because I don’t think character exists anymore.” It seems to me that Mandel, who merrily jettisons narrative conventions and plays cunningly with timelines, nonetheless insists on the essential coherence of her fictional creations. How many completely separate lives can Ari live and still track as a character? “I took out a contract on my cousin,” she says to the host of the Silver Lake party. “It was a mistake and I’m not that person anymore.” I don’t believe her. Though she probably would not now pay to have a close relative murdered, she remains the ruthless person who once did.
[Read: Emily St. John Mandel’s writing advice]
All of the doubling that powers the plot of Exit Party prompts us to consider how we recognize ourselves and others—whether we believe in the integrity of our persona and theirs. What is the essential stuff of our identity? What makes us whole? In The Singer’s Gun, Mandel has Anton Waker, the cousin Ari thought she wanted dead, provide an answer: It’s details, “small and personal and utterly beautiful and mundane, that make up the fabric of a person’s life.” Hinge moments may matter less than humdrum daily doings. We change tack, break free, and start over, yet we carry with us the stubborn imprint of all our old habits, the jumbled storehouse of memory, and a long trail of sensory data so familiar that it goes unnoticed. We endure.
And we suffer, due to circumstances beyond our control. This is where the doubling of the radically different nations comes in. Which is less awful, the calm and sinister surveillance state that Ibari serves with growing reluctance, or the “fracturing continent” that Ari yearns to escape? At first Ari reacts to chaos with a rueful calm—“You don’t notice the supply chain till it collapses”—but after years of “flashes of gunfire at night” from militia skirmishes that “stopped just short of all-out war,” a bone-crushing weariness sets in. As she knows, “Societal breakdown is exhausting.”
The “malevolent weight” of a tyrannical government is similarly sapping. When the secret police is everywhere, Ibari wryly notes, “anyone can be surveilling you at any time, including the person whom you are yourself surveilling.” To live peacefully, you make believe everything’s fine, ignoring “black cars moving too slowly down sunlit streets, unsmiling plainclothes agents in pairs, drones gliding quietly through the air.” At the academy where she trained to join the secret police, Ibari was told, “A harmonious society comes at a price.” The instructor added, “And we are not just the ones who exact that price, we are the ones who pay it.”
Mandel declines to identify any specific ideology in either world. No dictator is referred to in the totalitarian regime; no feuding warlords are named in the failed state. In both places, the status quo has evolved without recognizable human agency. That’s simply how it is—for now.
Ibari comes to treasure the phrase “No country lasts forever,” because “there was such hope in that.” A bitter sort of hope, but one that chimes with the spirit of the novel as it winds down, attuned to fluid time as well as fluid space. With Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “famous little poem” about burning the candle at both ends in mind, the artist Lucas Alkaitis (soon to die of a heroin overdose) reflects, “The point isn’t that the candle won’t last the night. Everything is temporary. The point is that the light is gorgeous while it lasts.”
This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “What Comes After America.”
The post Emily St. John Mandel Imagines What Comes After America appeared first on The Atlantic.
