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"Exit Party" | Reviewed by William Winkler
The year is 2031 in post-civil war Los Angeles. The former United States has been subdivided into competing republics and city-states. Foreign peacekeeping troops have been recently withdrawn from the city.
A well-known Angelino raconteur is hosting a party to celebrate the lifting of the city-wide curfew. Attendees begin to notice unusual occurrences; guests in the lavish apartment see other attendees appear and reappear in markedly different modes of dress. As the evening moves on Kareem, their host, disappears, not to be seen again.
Emily St. John Mandel’s recent novel, “Exit Party,” paints a picture of two near future American states in parallel, both equally disturbing.
The first is the scenario in which the book opens in the Republic of California; the second is the nameless State run by an anonymous bureaucracy supported by The Service, a network of shadowy surveillors who might be your boss, your neighbor, or your mother.
Characters appearing in one scenario reappear in the other, physically recognizable but living different lives with different histories and futures.
At the heart of this conundrum lies an experiment in teleportation at UCLA, an experiment that proved itself successful with ever increasingly sized animals, but which went catastrophically wrong when applied to its human creators.
St. John Mandel’s novel spends only the necessary time explaining the phenomenon, asking the reader to accept it. As is said of standup comedy, “If you buy the premise, you buy the bit.”
At the center of the novel is a small painting entitled “Swan Dive.” The painting appears repeatedly throughout the story, the only constant feature tying the parallel universes and their inhabitants together.
Readers might find the narrative confusing. The author does a commendable job of providing reminders of each character’s identity in a story that shifts scenarios frequently.
