America has two possible futures in this novel. Neither is reassuring

A few days ago I awoke to see that the White House had posted an AI-generated video to X of Donald Trump – the 80-year-old president of the United States – in character as superhero the Green Lantern. In the video, Trump appears to be conjuring a giant border wall, building a factory and summoning fighter jets, warplanes and military hardware.

Emily St John Mandel is the Canadian author of seven novels including Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. She lives in New York. Her latest is Exit Party, a dystopian sci-fi extravaganza in which we are asked to imagine life after the United States of America has collapsed. I wonder what led her to examine this possibility!

There are two parallel worlds at play in Exit Party. In one, it’s the spring of 2031 and the US has “come undone following a coup d’etat”. There has been a civil war, some states have seceded either alone or in alliances, cartels fight for power, and ex-con Ari is headed to a party. When she arrives, others note that “there is something wrong with the party”. There are “extra people”. Two guests double and one guest disappears. Where did they come from and where did he go?

Without spoiling too much, the second world is again the US but not – in this universe, citizens live in the “United State”, a surveillance state in which “voting was no longer required and the president would one day be succeeded by his son”. It’s very 1984: “Service” members secretly report on their friends and family, and critics of the state are “disappeared”. As one character describes it, “There was a world where my homeland had fractured into disarray, and another where my homeland had closed like a fist”. In both worlds, there exists a common refrain: “No country lasts forever”.

Exit Party’s interest in alternate realities is prescient, to say the least. On one level, it points to the actuality that at present, citizens of the US are living on a knife’s edge – life could look very different in five years than it does right now. At the same time, life there already requires that citizens exist in a state of cognitive dissonance, their consciousnesses split into knowing and purposeful unknowing. ICE “disappears” “enemy aliens” on suburban streets every day and records them on an extraterrestrial-themed website that includes a live arrest number and tracker map. In Exit Party’s United State, Ari’s doppelganger Ibari works for Service, but she also holds a cover job in which she works as an academic in urban planning. “In a place like this,” she says, “reality splits into two [...] there is truth in both versions”.

Reading Exit Party, I was reminded of Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky’s 2009 poem We Lived Happily During the War, about continuing to live while your country crumbles around you: “I was/ in my bed, around my bed America/ was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house./ I took a chair outside and watched the sun”. The characters in Exit Party relate to the state in different ways, but all are trying to hold on to their humanity and to each other, despite the odds.

This is not to say Exit Party is a totally sad, desultory read. Mandel resists didacticism and there is a lightness to her prose, a sporadic whimsy. Characters still want to have fun, enjoy each other’s bodies, dance. The pacing is swift, and there are elements of the novel that function like a heist romp – one narrative thread about a stolen painting between worlds reads more like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch than anything by Orwell.

The use of multiple perspectives within dual timelines mostly works, except towards the novel’s ending when the presence of one grounding protagonist might have given the denouement more heft. But this is nitpicking. Overall, Exit Party is a wonderful novel that distils the present while also positing, with genuine hope, that the future may be different from the past. And as we struggle toward a better future, there is still joy to be made and had. A poem by Edna St Vincent Millay is quoted in Exit Party, which illuminates the novel’s central thesis: “My candle burns at both ends;/ It will not last the night;/ But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—/ It gives a lovely light!”

Exit Party by Emily St John Mandel is published by Picador ($35).

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