The plot here, like the plots in the previous three Mandel novels I've read, is ingenious, eerie and complex; but not so complex it dampens curiosity ... Mandel knows she doesn't have to belabor her topical social commentary: It's of an unsettling piece with everything else that's packed into the three parts of this capacious novel ... Also unexpectedly veers into an action-escape adventure ... Weird and arresting.
Ambitious and captivating ... Crafting memorable characters is always a challenge, and Mandel doubles the task for herself with her two timelines. Even so, she succeeds ... feels like the culmination of her career so far, combining the thrills and mysteries of the author’s early crime novels with the expansive premises and speculative ruminations of later novels like Station Eleven.
Terrific ... Puzzling it out as it unfolds is one of its many pleasures ... The story deepens and expands in unexpected ways, across generations, into marriages, betrayals and rare acts of decency. In the world of Exit Party, through all of its tragic turns, we find Mandel at her best.
Seamless ... Weakness for catchphrases is my least favorite thing about Exit Party and the Mandelverse in general. It speaks to an impulse to reduce the novels’ mysteries to accessible bromides. Still, the habit is in keeping with the book’s paradoxically optimistic tenor. Ari and her counterpart are smart, resilient, personable women who, for all their wrongdoing, have a gift for finding happiness in the midst of breakdown. The hope they represent is the stabilizing force that bridges Ms. Mandel’s enterprising fiction.
An elegant, gracefully written crime story with sci-fi shadings ... Mandel’s characters are attuned to beauty, in nature and in fine art, and her sentences share this aesthetic orientation. She doesn’t write what is often thought of as literary fiction so much as puzzle-box novels ... Some readers may chafe at Exit Party's chicly urbane protagonists, many of them attractive prodigies who each seem to represent a different ethnic group, or maybe at her choice of villains—alternately, violent militiamen, agents of the totalitarian government, and fathers who don’t pull their weight on child care. Fair enough. I still gulped the book down.
Challenging ... The underlying theme...is irresistible: how shockingly little humanity understands about the sudden swerves and reversals that shape a life—or end it ... Stunning.
In this strand of the multiverse, the I that is me is not entirely sure what happens in Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Exit Party ... Anybody who promises you definitive clarity on this mind-bending story should be regarded with the suspicion reserved for Instagram health experts ... The only world-builder more efficient than Mandel may be God. With just a few deft strokes, she sketches out a nation somewhere between The Grapes of Wrath and Mad Max ... While giving the quantum woo-woo elements of Exit Party a few spins around the accelerator, Mandel concentrates on the lives of people moving about in the vicious safety of a total surveillance state. It’s 1984 woven through a Möbius strip of her own boundless ingenuity. But for all those dimensional hijinks, what lingers is Mandel’s poignant sympathy with these people lost in their world — or another’s.
Lovely, meditative ... Mandel, however, isn’t much interested in filling out the bigger picture here, or in engaging in the sorts of thought experiments about technology, politics, war, and other macro-historical extrapolations that preoccupy most science-fiction authors. Instead, she focuses on character and the ever-fascinating question of how a person’s life and self might have been different if some small or significant aspect of it were changed.
In Exit Party, as in Mandel’s other novels, it is nuanced human relationships and connections that demand the lion’s share of readerly attention, not the mechanics by which a speculative plot occurs ... Mandel particularly shines when engaging broad philosophical themes through resonances that are more symbolic than literal. The most salient of these themes are agency and the human capacity for meaning within the constraints of government ... A hopeful novel that understands the vast, oceanic nature of possibility. In the face of nearly cataclysmic events, the primary characters endure to varying degrees. Art matters. Existence remains mysterious—unsolvable as we know it to be.
An exhilarating expansion of Emily St. John Mandel’s multiverse ... The novel’s two-handed structure pulls off exhilarating feats of narrative derring-do ... It is difficult to summarize and works beautifully. Mandel is a virtuoso of complication, catching the reader up in suspense, then providing answers slowly, thoroughly, satisfyingly.
What makes Exit Party a superlative example of the form is its structural cohesiveness, its expert play of signs and symbols, its psychological realism. Mandel’s imaginative landscapes have from the first been intricately constructed, an elegant dance in which plot, character and idea appear effortlessly matched ... Her ability to handle a complex array of material while never once allowing her focus to drift from the human story reaches new heights ... Extraordinary.
The flood of dystopian novels being released these days is almost as exhausting as the daily news cycle, but, once again, Emily St. John Mandel shows us how it’s done ... Consider taking a deep dive into this ... For those already familiar with her work, there are some familiar tropes: shifting timelines, doppelgangers, 'hinge moments,' repeated phrases, and references to characters from her other books. There is also a depth of character development that rivals much of her best work.
Uncanny, distorted, unsettling, and completely engrossing. Mandel creates a web of characters and events that tumble together in a complex tale. You will be glued to the page, wondering how you would fit in such a reality, asking yourself what that kind of world would make of you.
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.
Exit Party’s speculative element focuses on alternative universes, but while the nature of these phenomena is mysterious for much of the novel, by the end, everything is satisfactorily explained ... Miraculously, nearly all the loose ends feel tied up by the close, with the sadness that imbues both universes predominant and apparently irreversible.
Mandel’s plot is complex but never obscure, as she shifts with great agility between timelines, characters and continents ... If Exit Party is a novel for our time, then, it is so in the sense of being a novel steeped in the preoccupations of its time, but of limited use in understanding our troubles ... If you’re looking to fret about what comes next from within the safety of a highly readable novel — one that you might be reading alongside a certain former president — this book will serve you well. If you’re hoping to reckon more deeply with what it means to be alive and politically responsible in our current moment, you may wish to look elsewhere.
Unfortunately, this book is disappointing, both in its literary and science fiction aspects. The writing is prosaic ... Littered with banalities ... In the end, it’s hard to know what the point of it all is. Perhaps it is simply to follow Ari’s character arc as she tries to redress the wrongs of her life (or lives), but this feels poor compensation in a novel packed with so many big but hazy ideas.
She’s once again delivered the kind of book that will fold itself around you like a blanket, offering comfort, warmth and diverting strangeness through its unsettling vision of the world ... A must read, whether it’s your first Mandel novel or just your latest visit to one of her worlds.
Smart and complex mind-bender ... These layers upon layers of what-ifs and what-could-bes make Exit Party as challenging and thought provoking as it is immersive. With her characteristic literary skill, Mandel invites readers to consider whom they each might choose to be at the end of the world as they know it—and at what cost to their individual and shared humanity.
Mandel always writes with clarity and precision. Her perceptive new dystopian novel explores what is lost in a rush to safety; it’s a hymn to what falls when the center doesn’t hold.
Sophisticated, layered ... [A] multifaceted, sprawling exploration of two very different futures for a country that stands on the brink of massive change. As ever in her own wholly original and singular way, Mandel offers up a completely compelling, richly rendered yarn that’s sure to generate both major interest and discussion.
Masterful ... Mandel’s assured tale offers bracing commentary on the dangers of divisiveness and surveillance, and the propulsive plot is fueled by the unfolding mystery of the initiating party scene. It’s a tour de force.
