There’s a game I like to play with my best friend of 25+ years: “What would change?” We take turns asking each other a variety of “What ifs”: What if we hadn’t gone to the same high school? What if you hadn’t met your spouse? What if you hadn’t gone to that bar? What if we had elected a different president? What would change?
Emily St. John Mandel’s upcoming novel, Exit Party, (pub date Sept 15), takes that conceit of “alternative paths” and expands it with a heavy dose of speculative fiction. The first half of the novel, Side A, (vinyl-lovers might suspect one of the novel’s “twists” from that alone) introduces us to Ari Walker, a 48-year-old woman recently released from prison after having ordered an unsuccessful hit on her cousin. It’s the year 2031, and Ari enters a Los Angeles both familiar and unfamiliar to us. It’s the first spring after the collapse of the United States, troops are withdrawing from the city, bomb-sniffing dogs congregate with soldiers on a Shantytown Sunset Boulevard, and all Ari wants to do is go to an apartment party in Echo Park.
Amidst the horrors of war and poverty, Ari still finds breathtaking beauty– a common theme in the novel. Mandel’s writing grabs us just as nature enthralls Ari: “It was Ari’s first spring outside of prison in nearly two decades, and she spent hours at a time walking the streets. Prison is a wasteland of sensory deprivation, and now the city was overwhelming. She kept expecting that the details of the world would cease to be extraordinary, but that kept not happening. No one around her seemed to notice the jacarandas, because in Los Angeles there are flowers every month of the year, but she walked streets where the trees were lit up by purple-blue blossoms and thought, My god. This place. She was forty-eight years old but felt younger, because so much of the world was new.”
The party in Echo Park is the catalyst for the major events of the novel. The party’s host, Kareem, begs for someone to understand that “There’s something really wrong with this party.” He’s not the only one to notice as a “bewildered twin” and “uncanny doppelganger” arrive, seemingly out of nowhere, and Kareem disappears… forever.
The mystery of what happened to Kareem– and of what will happen to the dissolved United States–will not be solved right away, but we can’t help but be fascinated by this propulsive version of our United States, most similar to the 2024 film “Civil War,” though slightly less depressing. Mandel has always possessed a Cassandra-type ability to predict potential futures, first with Station Eleven and the COVID-19 pandemic, and now with potential outcomes for our country: dissolution or authoritarianism. She investigates a world under totalitarian control, complete with a surveillance state right out of Orwell. Neither of these futures are ones we want for our country, but both are ones we could very easily fall into.
Yet, Mandel promises us, no matter what world we end up in, there will always be beauty. There will still be art… a fact highlighted by the presence of the painting, Swan Dive, created by a painter from Mandel’s novel, The Glass Hotel. (Who doesn’t love an expanded universe?) This painting, like the party itself, affects people long past its introduction, encouraging behavior both positive and poor.
Exit Party, which could be considered dystopian, is also a celebration: no matter how bad our circumstances may be or may become, there are still good people, good art, and good moments. As one character explains, “We don’t get to choose the world we’re born into,” a conceit mirrored in a discussion between Lord of the Ring’s Frodo and Gandalf that is reposted on social media whenever there is another attack on American democracy. Mandel reminds us that yes, our world is in chaos. Yes, we have no control of our circumstances. In fact, circumstances often seek to control us. And yet. And yet we can control how we respond. Perhaps our very humanity is the response. Ari confides,“What I’d learned in the disorder was to recognize good moments.” A child’s laugh inside a tent, the rain on city streets, the brushtrokes of a beloved painting. Now that’s a lesson I will take with me no matter which path I might take.
