From its opening line, Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel is intriguing, setting up a world that looks so different from our own but is also tinged with shades of things we are currently dealing with. Immediately you are conflicted, confused, compelled.
A story that seems to be about one character (Ari Waker) takes you on a journey with many characters — the ones Ari interacts with and the ones she merely knows exist, even if she’ll never meet them. Each character is complex, nuanced, and beautifully structured. None of them are perfect, which makes for an immaculate set of deliciously flawed people who seem to interact no matter what the world around them might do to try and change that.
Exit Party doesn’t come with many answers, rather it exists amongst questions — ones that the reader and the characters are both asking. Who am I? How did this happen? What if I just…?
Some books open one door for you at the beginning to enter and another door for you to leave at the end, but not Exit Party. Mandel guides you carefully through multiple doors, none of them shutting behind you, and when she escorts you out the last one it’s not because the story is over, it’s just because your time with the story is up — for now. If you’re anything like me, you’ll be thinking about it long after you close the book.
Exit Party is about Ari; it is about Kareem Fayed and Nico and Gloria and Sebastian and Marlowe and Samir and Ibari but it is also about us and how we relate to one another and the world — or worlds — around us. It will make you think about the world now, the world that might be coming soon, and how the world could end up many decades from now.
Emily St. John Mandel is a talented author and a creative mind that, truthfully, is unmatched. The way she thinks about the world and what it could be (and sometimes maybe what it shouldn’t be) feels wild in all the best ways. And Exit Party, her seventh novel, is her most powerful.
Exit Party is a novel about resilience as much as it is a novel about revolution. As the book’s characters build and rebuild their lives in countries that collapse and reconstruct, they learn new lessons as well as old ones and push themselves out of their comfort zones as often as they bury themselves in their safest spaces.
If any author embodies the phrase “life is complicated,” it is Emily St. John Mandel, who continually produces stories and characters that challenge readers. Exit Party is no different - in fact, it’s one of her best.
I was lucky enough to read a copy of this early thanks to a dear friend. Exit Party will be out September 15. You can pre-order it here.