Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel Review

Who has not been the protagonist of their own life, while playing a secondary character in someone else’s? In many of Emily St. John Mandel’s seven novels, this notion is brought to the fore by impressionistic plots in which characters’ associations with one another, their slipping from background to foreground and back again, provide a weblike structure that functions not only within a single book but also across works that otherwise stand alone.

Mandel’s The Singer’s Gun, from 2010, is one such book. In the literary noir novel, Aria Waker, cold and calculating, is from a family of criminals. As the clear villain of the piece, she blackmails her cousin Anton—the protagonist of the book, who longs to leave his past corruption behind—to force him into participating in another illegal scheme, involving fake passports. Mandel’s latest, the intricately built, dazzlingly expansive Exit Party, which careens across decades, continents, and even parallel universes, features Aria, now 48-year-old Ari, as a complex protagonist, this novel’s center.

Exit Party begins in 2031 Los Angeles. Following a coup d’état, the United States has collapsed into civil war—many states have seceded and become their own countries, including the newly formed Republic of California. On the night that a curfew has been lifted, as international peacekeeping troops leave Los Angeles, Ari and others in the city are ecstatic with hope, though there are occasional terrorist attacks by U.S. loyalists trying to destabilize the new nations. Ari goes to a party in a “cramped and glamorous” apartment in Silver Lake with her roommate, Gloria; the strangeness of that party haunts the rest of the novel.

There, Ari notices a double: Saraya, a woman wearing a silver pleated dress, later appears at the party in jorts, and in a panic she calls Ari “Ibari,” the name on her legal ID, and asks her where they are. Gloria has a double, too: Nico. And then Kareem, the host of the party, tells Ari that there’s something wrong, before he goes missing. The eeriness deepens when Gloria takes Swan Dive, a 1960 painting of the ocean with a pair of feet disappearing into waves, off the wall. When Ari goes into the empty kitchen, the painting is lying on the floor and then disappears; it turns up again under Gloria’s arm moments later.

The uncanniness of these vanishings dominates the whirlwind first leg of the novel, creating a loosely hallucinatory atmosphere around Mandel’s concrete world-building; the quasi-explanation for these glimpses into something otherworldly comes later, in the more tightly plotted second section. We learn that another universe exists, populated by doubles of the characters in this one; there, the United States is a surveillance state with a colony on the moon. Ari’s double, Ibari, thinks, “There was a world where my homeland had fractured into disarray, and another where my homeland had closed like a fist.” Rather than splintering, the latter place has shored up its resources to keep citizens in line through the work of an Internal Security Service.

Across her sometimes-interconnected novels, Mandel, whose sensitive, spare prose aims at the literary and atmospheric rather than the technical or probabilistic, has shifted between literary noir and speculative premises. Her science fiction tropes in Exit Party quietly grapple with the slipperiness of existence, the role of chance, impermanence, and the ease with which events, and even a single self, could go another way. There is a certain noirishness here, too: The harsh systems lend themselves to morally ambiguous choices and corruption.

Each character in Exit Party shares an identical genetic makeup with their double, yet their lives under two opposing power structures prove distinct. The doubles’ choices in the fractured world nonetheless feel tethered to the characters’ stories in the surveillance state. Before the events of Exit Party, Ari has spent 18 years in prison for taking out a contract on Anton. When we first meet Ibari, her actions in the surveillance state are distant from Ari’s; she’s a detective with the security service who maintains a quiet secondary life as an academic. Ibari is perplexed upon learning that Ari took a hit out on her cousin: Ibari is very close to her own cousin, Anton, and can’t imagine acting as her double had.

Further strengthening the ties between the books, in The Singer’s Gun, Anton swaps identities with David Grissom, a painter and drifter who offers to deliver an illicit package on Anton’s behalf. David appears as a security service officer in the surveillance state in Exit Party, and his existence plays a critical role in Ibari helping someone escape a desert camp. In addition to Exit Party’s callbacks to the milieu of The Singer’s Gun, Mandel’s latest work strongly alludes to the world of her 2020 novel, The Glass Hotel: Lucas Alkaitis, the artist who painted Swan Dive, is the older brother of Jonathan, a primary character in that earlier book, and the work’s protagonist, Vincent, who eventually disappears into the ocean, repeatedly videotapes the waves, just as Lucas painted them.

And, more significantly, The Glass Hotel casually raises the idea of a multiverse and alternate lives. Vincent’s thoughts almost seem to augur the writing of Exit Party, expanding on alternate realities and selves: “Her life in those days was so disorienting that she often found herself thinking about variations on reality, different permutations of events.… None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her.” In The Glass Hotel, Mandel calls these imagined alternate lives “counterlives” (as Philip Roth does); Vincent’s musings are melancholic. But here, it is the physical materialization of counterlives that allows Mandel to intimate that meaning remains available to us even if our actions could take an infinite number of forms.

Exit Party cites science to account for the doubles’ movements. Quantum entanglement—a physics process whereby two or more particles connect such that the state of one particle controls the condition of the other—is used as a form of background explanation for how the doppelgängers teleport across universes. Still, in Exit Party, as in Mandel’s other novels, it is nuanced human relationships and connections that demand the lion’s share of readerly attention, not the mechanics by which a speculative plot occurs. Quantum entanglement here serves a metaphoric rather than technical function, representing the mysterious bond between the doubles, the way in which their lives—Ari’s and Ibari’s, for example—veer in opposing yet occasionally similar directions.

Mandel particularly shines when engaging broad philosophical themes through resonances that are more symbolic than literal. The most salient of these themes are agency and the human capacity for meaning within the constraints of government; characters struggle to find their places within drastic political conditions that are two sides of the same coin. Yet the difficult nature of these systems, the noirishness of them, does not make the book pessimistic. Far from it. Exit Party is a hopeful novel that understands the vast, oceanic nature of possibility. In the face of nearly cataclysmic events, the primary characters endure to varying degrees. Art matters. Existence remains mysterious—unsolvable as we know it to be. Will we continue to make meaning if our country faces one of the two potential futures Mandel sets out? Her answer is yes. As Ari’s second husband says early on, “We don’t get to choose the world we’re born into. But you either learn to navigate that world, or you don’t.”•