Mandel’s New Novel Posits a Parallel World Where the 2009 Swine Flu Pandemic Went Very Differently

Mandel’s novels have long carried an after-the-end-of-the-world feeling, even when the world keeps turning. In her new novel, Exit Party, she returns to threads from two earlier books and sets them against a country that has come apart. What results is a story about people appearing in each other’s lives as duplicates, and nations becoming mirrors of one another.

“In real life, it isn’t captivating at all,” Mandel said.

The novel opens in 2031, with Ari Waker released from prison after eighteen years. She took out a contract on her cousin Anton’s life, a move that defined her past. The country around her has collapsed: a coup has broken the Union apart, states have seceded, and a second United States rises as a surveillance state with powerful controls. As Ari walks free in Los Angeles, the blossoming jacaranda trees feel to her like grace. The world she left behind is gone, and the world she returns to is strange.

Ari Waker’s Return From Prison

Mandel has said she kept thinking about Ari long after putting out The Singer’s Gun, even though Ari served as the book’s villain. Years later, she found herself wondering how Ari might have changed after a very long prison sentence. That question turned into the whole reason for writing Exit Party.

Mandel’s novel introduces Anton, since the doppelganger effect she describes is an embodiment of that counterlife. The choice to arrange for Anton’s removal through a contract created a debt Mandel wanted to examine more deeply. That emotional calculation meant that including Ari in the book required including Anton as well.

The painter Lucas Alkaitis appears again in The Glass Hotel, and his reason for showing up mostly comes down to Swan Dive, the painting that passes through the narrative. Mandel wants to explore how art travels through time, and how distinct individuals form connections with a single piece of art across decades or centuries. Because she already has a painter among her characters, she decided it would be worthwhile to bring him into this particular story.

Criminality and Quantum Entanglement

When Jane Ciabattari questioned Mandel about what draws her to criminality, the response pointed toward a world far from flattering to reality. “In real life, it isn’t captivating at all,” Mandel said. “Real-life criminality looks sad and sordid. It looks like all the locked-up people I’ve met when I do events at prisons.” Fiction, however, offers a different path: criminality can push a story forward in ways that feel genuinely compelling.

Ciabattari also pointed out that quantum entanglement theory, which involves particles linked in time instead of in space, shows up in several of Mandel’s novels. Mandel has a fondness for the weird. “It’s just so weird,” she said. “Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance.’ I like the spookiness.”

The Title and the Plot

Mandel confesses her weakness for titles. The book’s original title was James Exits the Party, a name she claims reads like a stage direction and gives a hint of an earlier version of the story. She found it appealing, yet no one else agreed with her.

It was her wife who settled on the title, Exit Party. The story opens with Ari, 48, walking free from prison in Spring 2031, having spent eighteen years behind bars for agreeing to end her cousin Anton’s life. She moves through Los Angeles, feeling that the jacaranda trees there carry something like grace.

The country fell apart during her time behind bars, fracturing into warring nation states with shifting alliances. The story’s second half takes place in an alternate version of the United States, ruled by an authoritarian regime. In this scene, peacekeeping forces from other countries have just pulled out of the city, and Ari’s roommate Gloria takes her to Kareem’s group, which is marking the occasion by ending the citywide curfew.

At the party, Ari meets a stranger named Saraya in a silvery dress who recognizes her and calls her “Ibari,” her legal name. Later, Ari spots a woman who looks identical to Saraya but is wearing jean shorts and a T-shirt and keeps saying “I don’t know where I am.” By the end of the night, Kareem disappears, as does a painting on his wall. Identical characters at the same party. Identical countries, with different political systems and freedoms. Doppelgangers, doubles, anchor this novel.

Developing the Plotline

The counterlife concept, a life you didn’t live — the life where you married a different person, or went to a different place — has long drawn Mandel’s interest. She developed that plotline slowly and with great difficulty, she said, and the doppelganger device gives her a way to show what that counterlife might look like when it shows up in front of you.

The plotline asks readers to hold two versions of reality at once. One is the United States that has broken apart, with states seceding within a week of a coup d’état. The other is a parallel authoritarian United States that emerges over time, with powerful controls. The novel’s central question is what the aftermath of a national collapse could look like.

Mandel’s Track Record

Mandel’s earlier novels include Station Eleven (2014), which won the Prix des Libraires du Québec, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Toronto Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner. Sea of Tranquility (2022) was described by Mandel as “autofiction through a sci-fi lens combined with time travel,” spanning five centuries beginning in 1912 with a pandemic wiping out Earth’s population.

Exit Party continues that pattern of post-pandemic dystopias. But this time the dystopia is political rather than biological. The year is 2031, and the United States has come undone following a coup d’etat. Several states seceded within a week of the coup, either alone or in alliances with neighbors.

What the Paper Makes of It

The book centers on a man who comes back from prison to find his nation in ruins, while living alongside a version of himself who exists within an altered reality. Ari and Anton are the two sides of that divided existence, and their story was what drew Mandel to the project. Her curiosity about the parallel life gave the whole thing its form.

Mandel’s novel grows from fear in the real world. She began writing it in the spring of 2022, not long before her conversation with Ciabattari, and the nation was only slightly less divided back then than it is today. The results of years of successful disinformation campaigns were already changing how we govern ourselves. It takes little effort to picture the country falling apart.

After a disaster strikes, the world left behind is where Mandel finds hope. She has said that it is there that she sees what remains worth keeping. The idea runs through her books, from Station Eleven to Exit Party, following the lives of those who survive and how they remake their world from the wreckage. “There’s hope in thinking about the world that follows catastrophic events,”

The book’s title, Exit Party, points to a gathering that marks both departure and farewell. It is a celebration where individuals depart, and it stands for the nation leaving its former form behind.

doppelgangers · Emily St. John Mandel · Exit Party · novels · Station Eleven