Our verdict on Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel: Not her best book

After a deep dive into particle physics in September with cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s non-fiction title The Edge of Space-Time, in October the New Scientist Book Club stuck with physics but made it fictional, with Emily St. John Mandel’s new speculative fiction novel Exit Party.

Set in the near future, this is a tale involving quantum entanglement and parallel worlds, but Mandel being Mandel, it’s much more a tale of the people who live in those worlds than the physics that makes them possible. Our sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson gave it a glowing review, saying Exit Party was “as elegant and brilliantly executed as [Mandel’s] fans will have grown to expect”.

The book starts in Los Angeles in 2031 in the aftermath of civil war, as the curfew lifts and our protagonist Ari, recently released after years in prison, sets out for a party. She and her friends see some mysterious doppelgangers at the party, but the mystery isn’t really resolved until the second half of the book. By then, we’ve followed Ari through the anarchy and chaos of this lawless version of the US, and we discover that another version of the future is also unspooling.

I asked Emily (Mandel, that is) what it was like to write about her imagined near-future US when we chatted. “By the time I finished the book, I felt like I was struggling to stay ahead of the American news cycle,” she told me. “In 2022 [when she started writing], the notion of masked police seizing people off the streets or shooting civilians in broad daylight would have seemed quite fantastical, but those were literally the ICE raids in Minneapolis.”

I adored the novel Mandel is most famous for, Station Eleven, another imagined near-future but this time set in the aftermath of a flu pandemic. I agree with Emily (Wilson, that is) that this latest is just as beautifully and brilliantly written, but I wasn’t quite as compelled by it, at least for the first half of the novel. By the time we got to the second half, the drama and the science fictional elements ramped up and I ended up really enjoying it, but it’s never that great to press a book on a friend with the words “just give it 100 pages…”.

Book club members, chatting on Discord as they read, were equally conflicted. “Just finished Exit Party. Not, IMO, Mandel’s best book,” wrote Tethysnz. “When I finished Sea of Tranquility, I went back and reread it right away to understand all the connections and undercurrents I’d missed. But with Exit Party connections are pretty clear and not all that interesting.”

Alan_P felt similarly to me about the first half – it’s “almost without incident except for the actual odd appearances and disappearances”, he wrote. “The pace does pick up a little in the final quarter of the book, but most of it is a beautifully described description of two very different societies,” he added. “It’s a good book – I don’t think it’s a great book but it is technically very good, and has an interesting ending. But it makes you work to get there and I don’t think that improves it.”

Matthew found Mandel’s writing style “overly careful, which gets in the way. Which isn’t to say she isn’t a very good writer, perhaps she just needs to let her hair down a bit”, while PiriShepherd, conversely, really enjoyed the novel’s opening. “I love the idea that a party is the place where the unintended bridge between universes opens up. A party is disorientating – somewhere you might be a bit drunk – where unexpected or inexplicable things happen – where people show up that you didn’t expect to see,” they wrote. “Where there might be consequences or disastrous events that extend beyond the next morning.”

“There’s such an intriguing start but then the mystery is largely left aside for a long time – possibly too long for the reader’s satisfaction?” said Dee55. “I found the book’s B part much more gripping – and disturbingly close to things that are already happening in some countries.”

Katita2026 found Mandel’s future visions very frightening. “She doesn’t give us a ‘bad world’ and a ‘good world.’ She gives us the two greatest political nightmares of the 21st century,” Katita   wrote, pondering if “the genius (and the terror) of this book lies precisely in this political pessimism”.

“By offering a world torn between absolute chaos and absolute tyranny, isn’t the author diagnosing that modern society has already lost the ability to imagine a future where democracy survives?” Katita asked.

As you can see, book club members really put this thoughtful, thought-provoking novel through the wringer!