Emily St. John Mandel doesn’t write sci-fi, nor does she write crime fiction. Except, she does—almost comically so, when you read what she’s said about the question. She set out to write literary fiction, but readers found it easy to tag her first few novels, Last Night in Montreal (2009), The Singer’s Gun (2010), and The Lola Quartet (2012), as mysteries or thrillers.
“I was surprised to discover,” Mandel told Washington Post book critic Ron Charles, “that if you write literary fiction with a crime in it, it turns out you’ve written a crime novel.” The problem? “I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a crime writer.”
Unsuccessfully Shaking Labels
So, for her fourth book, Station Eleven (2014), she penned a post-apocalyptic story about life on the front and back end of a near-future viral pandemic in which a traveling troupe of Shakespearean actors tries to bring solace to survivors, and a psychopathic cult leader manipulates his followers and grasps for power.
Success! Not a crime novel. But argh! Readers had another label for it. “I was surprised to discover that if you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer,” she told Charles.
Part of Mandel’s ambivalence involves a concern that readers looking for crime or sci-fi might be disappointed because she doesn’t lean into the genre far enough to satisfy their expectations. She needn’t have worried. Station Eleven won the Arthur C. Clarke award, given to the best sci-fi novel, in 2015.
Mandel seems to have made peace with it all. After a lengthy hiatus (compared to her prior pace), she published The Glass Hotel in 2020, which concerns a Bernie Madoff-style swindle and the lives affected by it (more crime), and then followed it up in 2022 with Sea of Tranquility, which involves a moon colony, alternate realities, and another speculative leap into the future (more sci-fi). Ye shall know them by their publishing history.
Now she offers us her literary fiction take on a dystopian thriller set in the multiverse, Exit Party (2026). But before I tell you about it, I want to revisit her second novel, The Singer’s Gun, because that’s exactly what Mandel does. Exit Party stands on its own, but Mandel enjoys the narrative possibilities of interleaving characters and elements of her several novels—as if they exist in one world where aspects from one corner may jimmy loose and bump into another; there’s interplay across her books.
One Last Job
Anton Waker has grown up in a family comfortably living on the wrong side of the law, trafficking in refurbished stolen art. His cousin Aria folds right in when she comes to live with them, and she and Anton start selling phony passports.
Though successful, Anton eventually wants out; the risks become too great for his nerves, and he seems to have something of a moral awakening, even if his eyelids are still half shut.
Having built a business on fake identities, he creates another version of himself (one that graduated from Harvard), takes a prestigious job, and lands a fiancée. Aria resents his move toward a life on the right side of the law and blackmails him into taking one last job, working as a go-between on one of Aria’s deals, while he’s on his honeymoon in Italy. If he doesn’t do it, she’ll expose his past. Poof! There goes the life of legitimacy he’s so diligently been trying to maintain.
Seeing no other option, he agrees. And the job goes horribly wrong, for all involved. I won’t say anything more except that it’s a perfectly constructed, complex story that warrants reading on its own. But it also lays the foundation for Exit Party, which begins decades later, now in 2031, with Aria—now just Ari—released from prison and living in Los Angeles with her roommate Gloria.
When Reality Fractures
By 2031, the United States isn’t united. It’s fractured into several regional powers, ranging from functional to anything but. As Ari busies herself trying to rebuild her life, a party thrown by Gloria’s friend Kareem—to celebrate the curfew being lifted in a still-recovering Republic of California—seems like just the thing. It takes some cajoling to get Gloria to leave the apartment, but off they go.
And then everything gets weird. People start seeing doubles at the party, and Kareem, shaken, wanders off and goes missing. He’s never seen again. Except he is, just not where he’s supposed to be.
Because Mandel doesn’t give us just one version of the future. She offers two. In the first, the political structure has fallen down around its ankles. In the second, the U.S. is radically centralized under despotic, constant surveillance. Any one of your neighbors might work for Service, and troublemakers are exiled to camps beyond the margins of society. These two futures exist in parallel worlds, and the real trouble begins when people from one inadvertently traipse into the other—beginning with those doubles at the party.
Mandel gives us action on both sides of the divide. Ari, for instance, leaves Los Angeles and ends up for a time in Ohio, working as an operative for a slightly criminal enterprise (so much for the straight and narrow). But as the North American situation deteriorates, she makes her way to Europe and starts a new life in Paris, one in which her fortunes turn, but her past won’t leave her alone.
Gloria makes an appearance with her son Sebastian, fathered by the missing Kareem but parented by Gloria’s double Nico, stranded after the party in Gloria and Ari’s world. Meanwhile, Ari’s double in the other world, Ibari, has her own problems.
What Outlasts Countries
If Ari has lived her whole life flouting the law, Ibari seems roughly the opposite. She’s had a long and successful career in Service, the consolidated, overarching law-enforcement entity that maintains an iron grip on society. But she has her own reservations about it—and her own subtle moments of rebellion, including making sure Nico’s children in her native world are taken care of, despite the laws she must break to manage it.
“Countries don’t last forever,” someone says at the party that starts the action. It doesn’t matter what you call it. What Mandel does is remind us that whatever happens across the wider political landscape, various as it may be, its futures as undetermined as they are, the bonds between people can be stronger, more resilient, and persist whatever comes.
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One of my favorite authors
This sounds fascinating! My reading time is really limited during the school year, but I will have to add this author to my TBR list.