When I read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel a good chunk of years ago, two things stood out for me in a novel full of clever and emotionally resonant storytelling.
First, that the author possessed a brilliant capacity for imaginative world-building, for predicting what might lie just over the horizon and how humanity would handle it, in ways both good and bad, and while the events of this novel, which rather presciently talk about a worldwide viral pandemic which kills in excess of 99 percent of humanity turned out prophetically on point (save, thankfully, for the massive death toll), went to some very dark places, hope still remained.
The second point was the way in which she centred everyone’s innate humanity front and centre in a story that could have easily been swamped by the blockbuster-level elements in its narrative but which instead became an affectingly thoughtful treatise on how the capacity of people to weather trauma and loss and somehow emerge on the other side in some sort of functioningly wondrous form, is something quite remarkable.
Time and again in her novels, St. John Mandel has returned to these themes again and again, and while you could feel completely subsumed beneath all the dark moments and harrowing events, what you are left with after reading her work is that beauty and hope can live and thrive in the midst of situations too darkly fantastical and yet unnervingly grounded for many of us to cope with.
And yet cope with them we do.
‘The basement?’ Gloria asked. ‘Why would he be living there?’
And in that verb Ari felt the vastness of the gulf between their respective life experiences. Gloria knew about collapse, but she didn’t understand murder.
In her newest work, Exit Party, the author serves another astonishingly original tale of people dealing with what feels like for many people like the end of the world.
For those in what used to be the United States, and yes, the past tense is key here, in 2021, it likely feels like the world has indeed ended; if not literally, the world they once knew of a mostly united fifty states, governed from Washington D.C. is rapidly racing out of collective memory.
Not so much because people have forgotten what happened but because what was these here United States is not a series of seceded states like the Republics of California and Texas, city states like Las Vegas and fiefdoms controlled by warring militias where living has given way to surviving, with little to offer beyond that.
Looking to the past serves no purpose and so those who can live as best they can (including those in stable entities like California and New York); those who can’t are left to fend on the margins, hoping that whatever form of survival they can eke out will be enough.
In the midst of the celebrations around the declaration of the Republic of California, which signals the departure of international peacekeeping troops and the return of a degree of self determination, we meet Ari, recently released from prison, who is lost in wonder at simply being out from behind iron bars and who decides that she wants to go to a party to celebrate what is by any measure an historic event.
It’s like any other party … until it isn’t.
Because in amongst all of the drinking and carousing and short-life conversations you expect at a party, to which Ari goes with her housemate Gloria and where she meets the host Kareem, something very strange happens.
Doppelgängers of two of the guests appear at the same as the host himself disappears, and while no one really notices beyond Ari who senses something isn’t right, or at least not normal in a world long shorn of any certainty as to its meaning, it sets in chain the imaginatively breathtaking events of Exit Party which takes us from a fractured, never to be healed United States – current events would suggest that eventuality is not as far-fetched as you might think – to a Europe holding on but barely and worlds beyond worlds in which inflection points show Sliding Doors moments which boggle the mind but which make sense when you consider the multiplicity of ways our lives can play out depending on the decisions we make.
In this near-future world where climate change is leading to the urban elite finding sanctuary in domed cities and the availability of things we now take for granted are shaken in their fleeting permanence, Exit Party tells the story of one woman’s survival and one man’s discovery of an unexpected life in a world in which he was never supposed to exist.
I had always been moving toward this moment. There were seagulls diving through the air before me, and I couldn’t imagine anything more beautiful than the sunlight on their wings. I thought, I want to dive into the ocean and keep swimming into the blue. But instead of doing this I took a deep breath of ocean air, and turned to face the arresting officer.
In both Ari and Kareem’s story, which intertwine in spectacularly impressive but emotionally nuanced ways, we see how the very worst can happen to people and they still manage to somehow survive and sometimes even thrive.
Exit Party continues many of the themes which St. John Mandel has infused into exemplary novels such as The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility, chiefly the idea that even when the world we know comes to an end, we find ways, sometimes startlingly clever and necessary ways, to make another, often in clear defiance of the odds.
But Exit Party also excels by asking what it means to be free in a world which is rapidly making it difficult, if not impossible, to have any choice in how we lives our lives – does the much-vaunted human quality of self determination even have a place in a world this tightly constricted and deadended?
You might think not but St. John Mandel would dare to disagree, arguing with one eye on the multiversal idea that we are the products of a thousand different decisions and just as many turns into other possibly realities, and with the other that no matter what happens we are always, always, the products of what we choose to do.
We may not feel like that decision-making and the hope for something good and meaningful inherently woven into it, means much when things go emphatically south, but St. John Mandel clearly disagrees with Exit Party a brilliantly incisive exploration of how loss and curtailed options can imprison us if we let them, but only if let them, and that we always retain the right to choose and in so doing craft a reality of our own making, no matter the state of the world.