Review of Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel

In Mandel's newest dystopian novel she presents two worlds, one lawless and one bound by constant surveillance, and she drops characters and their doppelgängers in and out of each. I was fascinated by this melancholy, layered story and its irresistible main protagonist.

It's the year 2030 and the United States has collapsed. Ari Waker has just been released from prison after serving a decades-long sentence, and she emerges to a nation in turmoil where many scrape and scramble to get by.

But her first night out at a California party with her new roommate Gloria holds more than a carefree, boozy romantic tryst with a stranger. The evening's inexplicable appearances and disappearances of partygoers--or was it their doppelgängers?--and strange, out-of-this-world occurrences puzzle Ari for years to come.

When figures from that night begin showing up in Ari's life in rural Ohio and again when she moves to Paris, she questions what she knows to be real, even as she begins to recognize an undeniable interconnectedness.

Through a spectacularly disastrous teleportation experiment and its aftermath, Mandel offers two versions of a future nation: one fractured, warring, and full of upheaval, and another bound by the Service, its order dictated by widespread peer reporting and surveillance. Neither is presented as more desirable than the other; both existences for our characters are complicated and full of danger. In each version, we witness haunting shadows, echoes, and repeated images: threads of similar characters, disparate conflicts around freedom, and sometimes life-and-death struggles against the ruling forces.

The State was a malevolent weight on their lives. It was a low-level fear that never entirely left him, it was black cars moving too slowly down sunlit streets, unsmiling plainclothes agents in pairs, drones gliding quietly through the air above him, a constant possibility of disaster. Sometimes people he knew disappeared and he never saw them again.

We see multiple characters' quantum doubles' lives in each imagined world--their uncertainty, their jarring encounters with those they think they know (but who merely look like those from another existence, whether they are appearing and disappearing or established within their environment), and their reckoning with and fight to understand their places in the world.

There is a melancholy air throughout the book, and even Mandel's magnificently imagined elements (teleportation, multiverse, doppelgängers, the magnificence and potential disaster of science, and bending an unyielding environment to one's will) occur within the novel's measured pace, as though in a gray haze and without any whizbang trappings.

Ari is a doer: she doesn't settle for accepting her current situation. She is sometimes guided by her premonitions and ability to predict events. (Does this stem from her existence in two universes? It's unclear, but it's handy here.) She digs, she pursues, she considers, and she takes action. We ultimately understand that in both of her worlds, this clever main protagonist has taken practical, creative problem-solving to a poignant, lovely, satisfying new level.

Mandel's novel feels like a gray, quiet atmosphere; the surface may feel calm, but complex genius, evil, or generous machinations are wildly at work under the surface. The interconnectedness and varied existences of similar characters throws a light on how a wild, lawless environment or a rigid lack of freedom might shape a person and their environment. I was intrigued by the characters' moral and behavioral consistencies and their differences across worlds. What has built them, what has buoyed them, what has threatened to break them?

I was fascinated as always by the world Mandel has constructed. Yes to all of Mandel's literary fiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, dystopian works!

*Note that other readers have strongly suggested reading The Singer's Gun and The Glass Hotel before reading this work because of this book's ties to those works and the whole Mandel multiverse. However, I did not, and I was still fascinated by this book.

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Emily St. John Mandel is also the author of Sea of Tranquility, Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, The Singer's Gun, and other novels.