Emily St John Mandel. Exit Party. ISBN 978-1-0350-8128-8. London: Picador, 2026. 304 pp. RRP $34.99.
Station Eleven author's latest skilfully entwines elements of science fiction and traditional novels.
On the one hand there’s the world we live in: a world of wars and famines, brutal racist oligarchs and their AI overlords. On the other hand, there’s the domain of virtual entertainment: Everything Everywhere All at Once, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The idea of overlapping universes, in particular, has become a rather facile pop-culture trope.
So what’s a bona fide novelist, a concocter of long-form fictions, to do under such circumstances? You can’t keep up. Reality is bound to anticipate your most startling inventions. You can always retrace your steps, of course: serve up some more of the same old tried-and-true material: adultery, murder, mistaken identities, stalking and bullying.
Emily St. John Mandel is probably still best known for her prescient novel Station Eleven (2014), centred on a flu-like pandemic which wiped out most of the world’s population. Written well before the advent of COVID-19, the filming of her story for a Netflix miniseries had to be shifted from Chicago to the smaller city of Mississauga in Canada to accommodate the disruptions of the actual pandemic: reality imitating art, as you might say.
So her new novel, Exit Party, has a certain weight of expectation on it. While not exactly an SF writer, she does use much of the machinery of contemporary sci-fi and cli-fi. But neither could you call her a mainstream novelist, in the traditional sense – a writer more interested in characters and their psychology than the events they participate in. Her work is really an amalgam of both approaches.
That’s not as unusual a literary stance as it might seem. As I read Exit Party, I was reminded of the heyday of High Postmodernism, when the novelist Vladimir Nabokov earned himself the cover of Time for the invention of Antiterra (or Demonia): the world parallel to our own where he set his long-anticipated late novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. Time’s cover art went on to proclaim that “The Novel is alive and living in Antiterra.”
This was way back in 1969, when the death of the novel was being proclaimed on all sides. Tom Wolfe said it would be replaced by the New Journalism. Alain Robbe-Grillet proposed the Nouveau roman as an alternative to its outdated nineteenth-century structures. Any number of pundits predicted that it would be overtaken by visual media such as cinema and television.
Emily St. John Mandel wasn’t even born at the time. Nor does she appear to find the vocation of novelist so problematic. Like Nabokov,, she has created two worlds: both heightened versions of our own. I don’t want to say too much about them, but anyone who reads the blurb will gather that one is an accelerated version of our own fragmentations and disorder; the other the precise opposite, a world of complete control of all the citizens, all the time.
What’s the point she’s trying to make? That the same character can be a thief in one world, and a police operative in the other? Do these diverging destinies make them entirely different people? The idea of the double is a device as old as fiction itself, but that doesn’t stop us from finding them fascinating. How similar can any set of twins really be? In Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” the twin performs more as a spasm of conscience, an hallucination designed to awaken the narrator to himself. In Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper the whole thing comes down to an argument over nature or nurture.
Each of Mandel’s sets of twins comes from a different reality, so each of them has a different conception of the world. More to the point, though, they seem to be inherently different – in their attitude to family, to society, to the meaning of self-fulfilment. For her, it would seem, the question of individual identity can only really be compared to a series of forks in the road – or, if you prefer, a double helix.
There are, after all, strange commonalities between the two worlds. A certain painting, Swan-Dive, portraying a wintry sea with a diver’s two feet disappearing into it, seems to obsess virtually all of the characters, through all of the ups-and-downs of their lives.
There’s a relaxed, somewhat languid quality to Mandel’s prose which somehow naturalises the bizarre mindscapes her characters are forced to inhabit. It’s not that any of them are particularly interesting or attractive, but they are – for the most part, at least – very believable.
And the issues she’s interested in examining are very much those of traditional, old-fashioned fiction: Is raising children more important than pursuing your career? Can you do both satisfactorily? Is there such a thing as a justifiable murder? It would really be easier to pair her with George Eliot or Virginia Woolf than with J. G. Ballard or John Barth.
Mandel’s book keeps folding back on itself to examine these questions from multiple angles, with overlapping narrators, and constantly shifting time-scales. It’s not until the very end of the novel that the deeper significance of its opening, the post-curfew party in Los Angeles which serves as a kind of focal point for the action, begins to come clear.
I have to say that I was left with more questions than answers: not so much about the merits of the book – it’s clearly a very accomplished, readable novel – as about the philosophical issues Mandel raises. She’s a naturally gifted storyteller but I’d actually see her as more of a metaphysician by nature.
The painting Swan Dive operates, in the end, as almost the only stable ground in all of these worlds, physical, intellectual and aesthetic. If I stop to ask myself about it, then I have to admit that it’s hard for me to express just exactly what it means – the last signs of the individual in a turbulent, storm-driven cosmos, perhaps? On the other hand, if I don’t try too hard to confine it to just one meaning, its importance seems perfectly clear.
Listener Reviews: Station Eleven’s Emily St John Mandel’s new novel arrives (29/9/2026)(3-7/9/2026)
NZ Listener, vol.303, no. 4471 (3-9/10/2026): 38-39.
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Emily St. John Mandel (2017)•
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