Emily St. John Mandel Imagines What Comes After America

Emily St.

John Mandel writes science fiction, with the accent firmly on fiction .

Imagination, not technical verisimilitude, is her strength; she wisely disregards the scientific in favor of the human.

Her indifference to plausibility is a measure of her confidence as a storyteller, and helps snare readers like me, who have a mild allergic reaction to postapocalyptic settings and outer-space odysseys.

Her previous novel featured time travel, interplanetary travel, and a cosmic glitch; now, in her challenging new novel, Exit Party , we have accidental teleportation between parallel universes.

The underlying theme, though, is irresistible: how shockingly little humanity understands about the sudden swerves and reversals that shape a life—or end it.

The new book also offers a prescient invitation to consider the human toll that a world of chaos or repression can exact.

Exit Party ’s stunning first sentence leaps ahead to 2031 and peeks into a woman’s soul: “In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace.” Newly released after 18 years in prison, 48-year-old Ari Waker is just getting used to a Los Angeles that has seen vicious internecine violence.

Although international peacekeeping troops have been withdrawn and the city’s curfew has been lifted, nothing like normalcy prevails.

Ari walks with her roommate from their apartment in Echo Park (note the locale) to a party in Silver Lake.

There, the incomprehensible happens: Two people from a parallel world materialize at the party, and another person (the host) is teleported in the opposite direction—all by accident.

The inexplicable appearances and disappearances are as disorienting for the reader as they are for Ari, who wonders whether she has a brain tumor or is having a stroke.

For the three teleported individuals, the experience is a disaster: instant, complete, and irreversible dislocation.

In the alternate universe, we soon learn, the “United State” has become a fortress, “closed like a fist,” where the national doctrine is “Harmony at any cost.” There we encounter, among other characters, Ibari, an enforcer of the brutally repressive social order.