Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel: A Book Review

I love Emily St. John Mandel’s writing. I’ve read Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel, and Sea of Tranquility. Exit Party is her seventh novel, and it is the weakest one I’ve read of hers.

Synopsis

It’s 2031, and the United States has fractured after a coup. Ari Waker, recently released from 18 years in prison, attends a party in Los Angeles to celebrate the lifting of a curfew. At the party, guests appear to be doubling, people seem to have twins or clones,  and the host vanishes between rooms. Her story runs parallel to that of Ibari Waker, her doppelganger, navigating a version of America that never collapsed but became a totalitarian surveillance state instead. Threading through both worlds is a painting called Swan Dive, and a physicist’s theory about objects existing in two places at once.

The Mandelverse

Exit Party is part of what readers have come to call the “Mandelverse”, a connected fictional universe Mandel has been building across her books. Characters from The Glass Hotel and her earlier novel The Singer’s Gun (2010) reappear here, and Mandel has said she often loses track of the connections herself, having tried everything from a wall of words to computer programs to keep them straight. The Singer’s Gun is one of her lesser-known books, and I’ve seen reviewers suggesting reading it first adds further depth.

My Review

I wanted to love this. Since I love ESJM. And the premise sounds fantastic.

But the structure of Exit Party is complex: shifting points of view, switching tenses, doppelgangers distinguished by minor physical details (a nickname, a scar), an A-side and a B-side unfolding in parallel. Mandel has said the B-side grew from the realisation that the doppelgangers needed an origin, so she built an entire second America to explain them.

The problem is that the ambition overwhelmed me as a reader. I found it very difficult to track who was who, and what was happening where. The tense shifts and POV changes didn’t create momentum; they created confusion. By the time I had oriented myself in one thread, I was dropped into another. 

Mandel’s prose is precise and controlled, which made me wonder: is it me? Is there something wrong with my reading? I almost wanted an English Literature teacher to sit beside me and walk through it line by line. But I don’t think it is me. Even the NPR review by Maureen Corrigan, which calls the book “ingenious, eerie, and complex,” notes that the energy drops when Ari leaves centre stage. And on Goodreads, Exit Party sits at 3.95 from over 24,800 ratings: low for Mandel, whose previous books sit comfortably above 4.0. And I saw not an insignificant number of reviewers matching my experience: a disorienting structure, not pleasurably mysterious.

Of all the books I have read from Mandel, this is the weakest. If Exit Party had been her debut, I don’t think she would have become the success she is today.

What I Liked / What I Didn’t

What I liked

The premise and Mandel’s sentence-level prose remain beautiful; this is not a badly written novel.

What I didn’t

The structure defeated me. Too many POV shifts, too many tense changes, too many characters who differ only by a scar or a nickname. Tracking the doppelgangers across parallel timelines required more mental bandwidth than the story rewarded. This is the least accessible of Mandel’s books, and unlike Station Eleven or The Glass Hotel, I didn’t feel the difficulty was earning its keep.

Final Verdict

If you are a devoted Mandel reader who has worked through her back catalogue including The Singer’s Gun, you may find Exit Party rich and rewarding. If you are coming to it as a fan of Station Eleven or Sea of Tranquility, be prepared for something considerably more demanding and less emotionally satisfying. Borrow it from the library and see how you go in the first fifty pages, you’ll know quickly whether the structure is working for you or against you.