Indie rock artist Eliza McLamb’s song “Irish Exit” details the slow fade out from intimacy towards the safety of oneself or at least the concept of being known. But what happens when you Irish Exit out from a party and through a revolving door to another version of yourself wearing the skin of another life. Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel Exit Party explores an apocalyptic America where the United States untie themselves into factions and a revolving door offers a different tale for the same characters in another life.
Ari, recently released from prison, lives with Gloria in Los Angeles or schematically what we know of this city. They scrape by their days working and surviving at least until Kareem throws a party kind of like the party at the end of the world, the tilting axis on the precipice, the spinning top in Inception that tells you the world might not be as it seems. Ari, born with a sense of knowing, from the moment she landed in jail for attempted murder of her cousin, to smelling death before it happens.
This party is not like other parties. The mathematics of the universe are off and there are too many people. As soon as they walk in the door there is Saraya in multiple outfits and Gloria with a doppelganger called Ibari, a legal name she never uses out loud. The novel’s structure follows that of a record A side and B side, which do not demand symmetry, and are each organized into their own song and dance.
The night Kareem disappears at his own party, Gloria doubles, and Ari leaves embarking once again on a life of crime in a lawless land with a nagging thought: what happened at that party? I sat down with Emily St. John Mandel for the Chicago Review of Books and cracked open this essential plot question as it derived from the author’s craft.
Several of St. John Mandel’s novels feature the setting of New York with a sense of dark iconography. Who could forget the line, “why don’t you swallow broken glass” from the New York Times Bestseller The Glass Hotel. The A and B side serve as a divide not of geography but on the space time continuum featuring Los Angeles and Paris as the predominant two settings across the aging life of our anchor character Ari and Ibari. This is peppered in with narrations of Kareem, Fayed, Sebastian, and Marlowe weaving across third person with chapters embedded within larger titular sections like “The Birthday Present” and “True Diligence.”
Readers of Exit West by Mohsin Hamid will draw parallels from the sci-fi and speculative elements of doorways across the current landscape as a form of escape. Literary influences include the modern news cycle, and American War by Omar El Akkad as an oral history of the Civil War. The most direct parallel named during our conversation is The City & The City by China Miéville.
“The premise is the premise struck me at the time as fantastical, but now it feels oddly real. He imagines a world where two different cities exist in exactly the same geographical location. So let’s just say, just for the sake of explaining this, there’s say a blue city and a red city. The people in the red city have a completely different culture and train themselves to only see the red buildings. The people in the city train themselves from childhood to only see the blue buildings. There’s a degree of mutual hostility, but they cannot be at war with each other because it is exactly the same city. It’s just like every third building on the street, one color or the other,” said St. John Mandel.
Therefore, the introduction of multiple characters living within the same cities across different universes: Ari and Ibari, Gloria and Nico, Kareem and Fayed. To the point raised, although the novel exists in third person, giving the reader a sense of remove documenting the speculative history around them, there is a sense that “it is exactly the same city” across the A and B side just with different outcomes.
One constant across these worlds is the use of art as a portal and consistent piece within these character’s lives, Swan Dive, gets its own small section as a prelude to the events in the novel, embedded towards the end detailing how the painting came to be. Perhaps the largest lesson from this allegory for lack of a rose-colored glass or a duct taped pair (you’ll understand once you read the novel) is the staying power of art, the analog, and the physical in a world surveilled and destroyed.
“I feel like art is profoundly important, and we live in a society that doesn’t value it particularly highly. But I think that art can remind us of what it means to be human, and it’s hard to say that without sounding grandiose. But just that reminder that we need something more than just food, water, and shelter. You know, we kind of aspire to something a little higher than that, and that’s what our art is and what it reminds us of,” said St. John Mandel. The technical component of Swan Dive’s inclusion remains for consistency as an anchor or two sides of the same coin demonstrating the differences between characters through their relationship to the piece and changing of ownership.
Exit Party as speculative fiction incorporates craft elements of the analog record, transcripts for a dimension traveling interrogation, and a cut to a painting’s origin, not quite a cold open in chronology. To overexplain the plot would defeat the purpose of Ari as a narrator on the A-side guiding the reader with her profound sense of knowing that something seems off kilter and her survival instinct honed through time atoning in prison and true diligence. While Ibari’s side of the coin as an officer of the new age law must intuit the systems she operates within and the secrets harbored by the slippage in time.
FICTION
Exit Party
By Emily St. John Mandel
Knopf
Published September 15, 2026
