Emily St. John Mandel’s Fluid New Novel

Emily St. John Mandel’s novels remind me of swimming pools. Her seven works of fiction—which include “The Glass Hotel,” “Sea of Tranquility,” and “Station Eleven,” the 2014 pandemic novel that became a sensation during the first wave of COVID-19 (and was adapted into an award-winning HBO show in 2021)—feature sliding-door realities and a sharp sense of contingency. Her characters tend to be escape artists and flight risks, poised at any moment to drift into being someone else, somewhere else. Her writing has an aqueous quality: things slip or ripple or hold a soft glow; rain mists down; ships glide forward in the night. She repeats evocative images—a character swan-diving into water, for example—investing them with cumulative meaning. This piling, as much as her propulsive, suspenseful plots, supports the books’ slow-burning sense of revelation.

“Exit Party,” Mandel’s latest novel, released yesterday, is an elegant, gracefully written crime story with sci-fi shadings. It’s set in 2031, and presents two parallel time lines that comment in opposite ways on contemporary politics. In the first of these, the United States has disintegrated into warring territories, its contested zones overrun by militias. The second half unfolds in an authoritarian surveillance state—“my homeland had closed like a fist,” one character says. Her name is Ari, and the novel’s multiversal machinations allow her to play both cop and robber. When Mandel introduces her, in Part 1, she’s just been released from prison (she took out a contract on her cousin), and is soon drawn back into an underworld of gun runners, counterfeiters, and mercenaries.

Mandel’s characters are attuned to beauty, in nature and in fine art, and her sentences share this aesthetic orientation. She doesn’t write what is often thought of as literary fiction so much as puzzle-box novels with a literary filigree; the complexity, friction, and ugliness of realist fiction, in particular, would perturb the works’ single fluid note. Some readers may chafe at “Exit Party” ’s chicly urbane protagonists, many of them attractive prodigies who each seem to represent a different ethnic group, or maybe at her choice of villains—alternately, violent militiamen, agents of the totalitarian government, and fathers who don’t pull their weight on child care. Fair enough. I still gulped the book down.

For more: read Waldman on Mandel, from 2022.