“Exit Party,” the latest novel from Canadian-American writer Emily St. John Mandel, is a timely one. In a near future, the United States has collapsed into civil war, then fragmented into an uneasy congregation of independent republics. In a parallel timeline, the same country has become the “United State,” a totalitarian surveillance regime that, in one character’s description, “closed like a fist” while the countries around it were shattering.
Here we get the twin fears of American liberals brought to fictional life: descent into civil war; descent into autocracy. Mandel has been prophetic before: her 2014 novel, “Station Eleven,” imagined a global pandemic six years before COVID arrived. (In 2021, following a pandemic-era revival of interest in the novel, “Station Eleven” was turned into an HBO miniseries.) Let’s hope she’s wrong this time.
But this time, it should be noted, Mandel’s choice feels less prophetic than opportunistic, an attempt to seize the zeitgeist rather than read into the future.
“Exit Party” begins at a party in 2031, held in honour of the departure of foreign troops from the Republic of California — we are in the civil war timeline — and the lifting of a curfew. At this party, the host disappears, while some of the guests seem to have doppelgangers. The rest of the novel is an exploration of just what happened on that otherworldly night.
The story skims and swoops, sparrowlike, back and forth through the life of one of the party’s guests, Ari Walker. Ari is a ruthless but admirably tenacious woman with a checkered past and an ongoing comfort with criminality. As “Exit Party” progresses, the story splinters, adopting the perspectives of other characters connected to the party, before moving into the parallel universe of the United State.
Mandel’s plot is complex but never obscure, as she shifts with great agility between timelines, characters and continents. For a stretch, we find ourselves in Paris, over which an enormous dome has been erected, mainly to shelter the city from extreme weather events. (We learn in passing that Toronto is getting a dome, too. Yay?) The descriptions of the dome and its construction are depressingly plausible.
Out of this varied fabric, Mandel weaves an engaging drama of friendship and parenthood that is heady and often poignant. Yet the ambitious scope of the story leaves too little time for character development, and some of its conceits feel like distractions from something more substantive.
“Exit Party”’s dual timelines, for instance, advance the plot in exciting ways, but raise more questions than Mandel seems interested in answering. What accounts for the differences across timelines, given so many similarities? What role is there here for human freedom?
Similarly, the novel opens up big political themes, but Mandel does not explore the mechanisms that undid the U.S. in either timeline, or why these parallel catastrophes occurred only in the U.S. (so far as we’re told). Assuming America is uniquely doomed is another form of American exceptionalism.
Without meaning to imply that Mandel has any obligation to write about her native country, one might also expect an author born and raised in Canada to have thoughts about what was happening north of the border during the failure of the American experiment.
Though there are gestures toward the emancipatory power of art and the importance of individual conscience, Mandel has little to say here about how to rejuvenate our ailing societies. Nor are her descriptions of life under conditions of civil war or totalitarian surveillance especially piercing. We are told more than once that always wondering whether and how one is being surveilled is “exhausting.”
If “Exit Party” is a novel for our time, then, it is so in the sense of being a novel steeped in the preoccupations of its time, but of limited use in understanding our troubles.
Following the success of “Station Eleven,” which, in 2024, the New York Times listed as one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, Mandel’s novels have been well-received, not least by former U.S. president Barack Obama. He included “The Glass Hotel” and “The Sea of Tranquility” on a list of his favourite books of 2020 and 2022, respectively.
If you’re looking to fret about what comes next from within the safety of a highly readable novel — one that you might be reading alongside a certain former president — this book will serve you well. If you’re hoping to reckon more deeply with what it means to be alive and politically responsible in our current moment, you may wish to look elsewhere.
