Emily St. John Mandel (Sea of Tranquility; The Glass Hotel; Station Eleven) ponders the fine line between chaos and control--and between one world and another--in Exit Party, a smart and complex mind-bender of a novel.
In a near-future Los Angeles, Ari reluctantly agrees to accompany her roommate, Gloria, to a nearby house party. This would be routine enough, except the party is Ari's first after serving 18 years in prison; Gloria has a touch of agoraphobia after being severely injured in a bombing; and house parties have been an impossibility for years because of citywide curfews following the collapse of the former United States. Even amid all that, the party still feels off: doubles of some partygoers appear without explanation and the party's host, Kareem, vanishes without a trace.
After this one party comes an unraveling and untangling, with Ari "skirting the edges of some incomprehensible mystery that she'd entirely failed to notice at the time." Her journey takes her across the fractured states. She works for a militia in the Republic of Ohio, runs guns through the big-box Staplestown in Phoenix down to Texas, takes off to the shores of Greece on a fake passport, then lands, thrice-widowed and mourning, in a ritzy apartment in Paris. "We don't get to choose the world we're born into. But you either learn to navigate that world, or you don't."
This theme of resilience runs through the heart of Exit Party, asking how people hold on--as individuals and as collectives--through upheaval, change, and loss. But Mandel probes further with such stimulating and thorny questions as: What if this is not the only world grappling with these questions? What if that years-ago party was not just a party but somehow a door--one that opened one way and spit out two doppelgängers before disappearing Kareem into a parallel place. In this alternate United States, "the difference between mayhem and order is control." There are no private militias or independent states; instead, there is a unified, fascist force with a powerful surveillance network, two Kareems, and a missing physicist or two. ("I was in the other place, then there was a feeling like plucking of the string of a guitar, but I was the string. Then I was in a kitchen, at a party.")
These layers upon layers of what-ifs and what-could-bes make Exit Party as challenging and thought provoking as it is immersive. With her characteristic literary skill, Mandel invites readers to consider whom they each might choose to be at the end of the world as they know it--and at what cost to their individual and shared humanity. --Kerry McHugh, Textus Collective
Shelf Talker: With her characteristic literary skill, Emily St. John Mandel ponders the fine line between chaos and control in a post-collapse United States in her mind-bending, immersive novel.