Emily St. John Mandel’s brilliant new novel “Exit Party” begins five years in the future at a party in L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood where a series of mysterious, hard-to-explain events set the story in motion.
But before we begin to explore the novel, we need to address another inexplicable event: A few summers ago, this reporter briefly met Mandel at an event at the home of novelist Gabrielle Korn, and after reading and re-reading “Exit Party,” it was hard to shake the sense that Mandel had set her fictional L.A. party on the very same street at the very same house as that very real gathering.
But that couldn’t be, right?
“I added a terrace to the side of the house, but it’s absolutely the street,” says Mandel, confirming my suspicions with a laugh when asked about the party scene’s setting. “I was thinking of that house when I wrote the book … Definitely by the third revision or so, that was kind of their house.
“After they’d read the galley, they were like, ‘…Is this our house?’” says Mandel, who’d sent Korn and her wife an advance copy. “And I was like, ‘Well, it’s not not your house.’”
Korn confirmed this via email. “I noticed that the titular party itself actually felt very familiar, too — my wife and I throw an annual garden party at our home in Silver Lake with our friend Lauren Cerand, who is a literary publicist,” she wrote in part. “Emily has always attended.”
“While the house is not exactly mine, since we lack both a side balcony and a portal to another dimension, it’s similar enough that it feels like she planted a little gift for me,” Korn wrote. “Such is the joy of befriending one of your favorite authors!”
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While none of this is essential to a reader’s understanding or enjoyment of “Exit Party,” a real-life doppelganger to an event in the novel is just the kind of uncanny twist that Mandel excels at in her fiction. Her novels often include a triggering incident viewed from changing perspectives, with each new look offering fresh revelations. The entwined narratives of “Exit Party,” which moves from L.A. to Paris, Greece and other less-glamorous locales, will appeal to readers of her previous novels, “Sea of Tranquility,” “The Glass Hotel” and “Station Eleven.”
One of the book’s earliest supporters, novelist Ann Patchett, praised “Exit Party” a full six months before it came out.
“‘Exit Party’ is magnificent, and especially if you are a person L.A. born,” said Patchett, who mentioned the novel during an interview earlier this year. “Oh my god, it’s so good.”
Set five years in the future after a civil war has splintered the once-united states, “Exit Party” combines rich, literary writing with the white-knuckled grip of a thriller, along with moments of humor. If the novel reads like Mandel is blending imaginative genre storytelling with serious fiction, well, she’s not not doing that.
“I feel like this book is speculative fiction, but it’s also literary fiction, and I’d love for it to be thought of as not just sci-fi, but sci-fi and also something else,” she says. “I see it as literary fiction with a speculative edge.”
In a discussion that aimed to avoid “Exit Party” spoilers, Mandel spoke via Zoom from New York City about the book, ghosts, her dance background, literary violence, doubles and more. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. There are many ways one could describe “Exit Party.” We’re both trying to avoid spoilers, but how do you describe it?
I have found this book to be pretty resistant to the elevator pitch, but the way I’ve been trying to frame it lately is that it’s a story about crime and resilience, about who you’re going to be in difficult times — what kind of person you’re going to be — what kind of person you’re going to be at the end of the world,
Q. Can you talk a little about how someone’s world might come to an end?
Absolutely, our personal worlds end all the time. Consider the death of a loved one; countries end on a fairly regular basis. How many people alive in the world were born in, say, the former Yugoslavia or the former Czechoslovakia? These arrangements generally don’t last forever.
It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past 10 years, really since the first Trump administration. After he was elected for the first time, the thing that everybody said to each other was, “Look, nothing lasts forever,” and they meant that in a comforting way. But look, I wrote “Station Eleven.” The way my proclivities go, I heard that and thought, that’s both positive and negative.
It’s nice to think that the worst moment coming to an end. But on the other hand, of course, entire societies end, too, or shift into something completely unrecognizable. So I see my political anxieties around that idea playing a really big part in this book.
Q. This novel feels very contemporary, even though portions are set five years in the future. Was there a particular triggering event that inspired it?
To be honest, it was hard to stay ahead of the news cycle in writing this. There was no single precipitating event for me. The starting points for the book were twofold. There was the character Ari, who was actually the villain of a small-press book that I published way back in 2010 called “The Singer’s Gun,” where she was Arya. She was the unambiguous villain of that book, but I’d found myself thinking of her ever since: What would that character be like at the other end of a very long prison sentence? How might she change? So I found that individual character compelling.
The political aspects of the book, which I would say are less important than character but they are important, really came out of the natural anxiety I feel every time I read the news. It’s more pronounced now, but it was certainly in play by the spring of 2022, which is when I started writing this book.
You don’t have to have a wildly advanced speculative imagination to look at the moment that we’re in — the incredible division in this country — and just extrapolate that forward by a few terrible steps.
Q. I was rereading your books, and in some ways, it seems like a new novel sprouts from an idea in the previous one but taken in a new direction. In “Sea of Tranquility,” a character refers to time travel as “a security problem,” and issues of security play a role in “Exit Party.” Are you sometimes left with lingering ideas that lead you directly into the next one?
That’s interesting. As I think about this, I’ve never seen them as following directly one upon the other, but there is definitely a thing where you’re thinking about a set of ideas for the marathon period of time that it takes to write a novel — that two and a half or three or four years or whatever it is — and then you get to the end, and the story’s finished. But those ideas are still there, so I think on some subconscious level that is possible. That one kind of comes out of another, and another, and another.
For me, the links between novels usually come down to an attachment to particular characters. The one that comes up all the time is the way the character Miranda is in “Station Eleven” and then “The Glass Hotel.” And for me, it was that I found her really compelling. I just wanted to spend more time with that character and just develop her more fully in the context of a different story.
Sometimes I just have this desire to pull books together. I’ll have written some small detail in a long-ago book, like this electronica group called Baltica that appears in “The Lola Quartet.” It’s a tiny plot point. It’s not even a plot point; it’s just the music she likes. And then when I needed a group of musicians in “The Glass Hotel,” I was like, “Oh, I did this already. I can bring them in.”
It’s such a chaotic world. There’s something satisfying to me in that sense of order and thinking that perhaps these books could be connected in some small way.
Q. There’s a painting mentioned in “Exit Party” that appeared in another one of your novels, and I wonder how you came to include it in this one.
The painters are ported in from “The Glass Hotel,” and it’s probably a good moment to mention that I don’t actually write sequels or trilogies. You can definitely read these books in any order, but there were a couple of things at play here.
One is just that from a purely technical perspective, I find that when you have a novel that has a lot of characters, a lot of different points of view, maybe multiple timelines, it can be really helpful to have at least one object act as a kind of clean throughline through the book.
So it’s a painting in “Exit Party.” Or the “Doctor Eleven” graphic novel in “Station Eleven” is another example of that. I think it just helps to tie the whole house of cards together, you know, not to mix metaphors too badly. It just keeps it a little more stable.
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Q. Art, theater, dance and the arts are recurring elements of your books.
I do find myself drawn generally to writing about art. I think that our relationship to works of art can be really interesting and really important. And you know, I’ve always loved the idea that five people could read the same book and have completely different relationships with it, and come away with completely different ideas of what the book was about, and that maybe the same could be true with all works of art, like the way that multiple characters in “Exit Party” have a relationship with this particular painting, “Swan Dive.” I like the idea that it’s important to them for very different reasons and different degrees and in different ways.
There’s something interesting to me and kind of moving in the way a work of art moves through time, and it goes on to have this whole life well beyond what the artist could ever have expected or imagined. There’s something kind of beautiful in that to me.
Q. “Exit Party” isn’t an especially violent book, but you engage with violence more than the other novels. Does that seem like an accurate assessment?
My philosophy around violence has always been that you can really just hint at it or suggest it, and that can be at least as effective as spelling it out. So yeah, I would say that I went a little bit further in this book, and I guess I’d say it just felt like what the story demanded.
Q. You know, one thing I don’t think gets mentioned enough is that your books are funny.
The book doesn’t feel realistic if there’s no humor in it, which is maybe a strange thing to say about a book whose subject matter is objectively a little bleak.
But I think it’s that potential bleakness that makes the humor so important. I feel like very serious topics have to be dealt with with the lightest possible touch. If you can’t bring in little moments of light, then a) it’s relentless and nobody wants to read that, and I don’t want to write it. and b) it doesn’t feel real, because we do bring humor to everything. Gallows humor is famous for a reason.
Q. That’s true. My siblings and I could still find things to laugh about even as we cared for our dying parents. It was like connecting with the joy that existed when our loved ones were here.
That’s really nice. My dad died a few years ago, and I find myself thinking humor was the legacy. He had this real instinct for finding the thing that was funny in any given, totally banal day-to-day scenario. And I’ve tried to pass that on to my daughter because it’s a fun thing to have.
Q. One of the characters is a dancer, and you trained as a dancer. I’m curious about how you see these connected.
There’s a line that I’ve played probably way too many times on stage for laughs about how your worst day as a writer is so much better than your worst day as a dancer. You can make it funny, but it is objectively true. A bad review sucks, but that’s not as bad as being in an audition with 200 other women competing for one job, dressed in skin-tight clothes with a number pinned to your chest. That’s dehumanizing.
But on a more serious note, there’s something about how incredibly difficult dance is that I think makes you a more disciplined person. So having been a dancer, that background, I think, does make me a more disciplined writer, and probably would have made me a more disciplined anything — a more disciplined lawyer, a more disciplined engineer, whatever the next thing was going to be.
I find the two forms pretty different, though. I much prefer writing.
Q. Doubles appear throughout your work, and I wonder how you approach showing two different sides of a character or an environment.
This would not be a surprise if you read “The Glass Hotel,” but I’m fascinated by that idea of the counterlife that I got into in that book, which is the life you didn’t live. How different would you be? What would the similarities be?
It’s an interesting thought experiment for me, partly because my current life feels a little bit improbable. I don’t have a high school diploma. My only real post-secondary education is in contemporary dance, so in a way, my counter lives, like the life where maybe I stayed in Canada and continued dancing and never began writing novels, almost feels more plausible than the life I’m actually living. This could have ended up so differently.
What’s different in this book is thinking about the counter-life of the state, and maybe in any country, it’s pretty easy to look back at its history and find the inflection point where a country went down one path instead of another. And then, within a very short span of time, it becomes a different country than what it could have been. Not to talk in circles around the most recent federal election, but here we are.
That was definitely part of the project of “Exit Party,” thinking about what different versions of the United States could look like. We are so influenced by our surroundings, by environment, by the people around us, so if you or I had grown up in different versions of our countries, we would be somewhat different people. That does shape a person’s character. So it was interesting to think of doubling in that context.
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Q. Can we talk about ghosts? They sometimes appear in your work, and I wonder why that is.
I’ve always been interested in the idea of ghosts, without ever having seen one. People you’ll encounter on, say, Instagram who work in hospice settings — nurses, death doulas, people with those kinds of jobs — will talk about how, pretty consistently, when a patient’s dying, they’ll start seeing dead relatives who’ve come to almost escort them away. And it’s such a common occurrence; it gives me chills. I find it fascinating and incredibly moving.
I like thinking about the different possibilities of what it means to be haunted, because I think we’re all a bit haunted, you know, by the things we wish we’d done or hadn’t done, or whatever the thing is in your life. It’s something I think about a lot.
Emily St. John Mandel in conversation with Rachel Khong
The “Exit Party” discussion will be presented by ALOUD, a program of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, and co-presented by Skylight Books.
When: 7 p.m., Sept. 17
Where: Barnsdall Gallery Theatre, 4814 Hollywood Blvd., L.A.
Tickets and information: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/emily-st-john-mandel-exit-party-tickets-1992097223421?aff=oddtdtcreator