CBR18 BINGO: Friends, because I tell all my friends to read Emily St. John Mandel
BINGO: Or, Friends, Refuge, Bird, Repair
In 2031, the United States has been fractured into various territories and Republics. People make a living by whatever means they can, however illegal and or/dangerous. In France, climate change has become such an issue that the government has built an artificial dome around Paris, breaking the country into “haves” and “have nots.” The near future looks grim.
And that’s the better-case scenario.
Exit Party tells the story of a world with two timelines: one is chaotic and dangerous (see above); the other offers the safety of a surveillance state, where everyone you know could be informing on you to the government, and it takes very little in the way of “transgression” to turn a citizen into a “ghost,” someone with no rights and no legal status. At a party in the chaotic version of Los Angeles, a man disappears, while two women who are nearly identical to two of the party guests suddenly appear in a state of confusion and panic.
This isn’t a story where “spoilers” really matter, but I’ll leave the plot summary there out of respect for the way Mandel unfolds it. As I’ve come to expect from Mandel, this is a story with layers of symbols and themes, only one of which is the relative pros and cons of post-war reconstruction vs the security of a surveillance state. Parallel universes obviously figure heavily in the novel, but this theme of multiple lives plays out even for characters that only know “one” life. As one character says, “I think if you live long enough, you become a migrant from another timeline. There’s the world you learn to navigate as you enter adulthood, and then that world slips away from you by degrees, and after a while there’s nothing left of it, but you’re still here.” If you’re reading this novel as a 25-year old (just for example, no shade to Gen Z), pick it back up again in another 25 years, and I can almost guarantee it will hit you differently. At some age, you may come to realize you have had maybe three or four timelines.
The abiding legacy of art is another theme, though not played as heavily as in other Mandel novels (i.e., Station Eleven). A painting called Swan Dive (painted, incidentally, by Lucas Alkaitas, whose name you may recognize from The Glass Hotel), figures into the plot and is also a recurring motif, with one character doing a literal swan dive off a cliff while another character observes the beauty and grace of the motion. Several characters own the painting over the course of the novel, with one character expressing its significance by revealing, “I used to stare at that painting by the hour, and imagine my father staring at it in the past, and then imagine time collapsing so we were looking at it together, and there was comfort in that.”
Finally, human endurance, and the ability to find beauty in the darkest of places is ever-present. On page one, in post-war Los Angeles, a character recently released from prison “kept expecting that the details of the world would cease to be extraordinary, but that kept not happening.” In the other timeline, another character, nearing death, says to his children, “This is such a hard place. This State. But I’ve loved being here with you.”
If there’s one thing Emily St. John Mandel never lets us forget, it’s that humans endure. What other choice do we have?
4.5 stars
