Another Civil War Would Be Bad. A New Book Imagines Something Even Worse.

Books Two Bad Places Emily St. John Mandel’s latest hops futures, grimly. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Laura Miller? Sept 15, 20265:45 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The world, as Americans tend to forget and then relearn, can change in an instant, and with that, whatever life you planned to live in it. This instability has been an abiding theme in Emily St. John Mandel’s novels, from Station Eleven, her portrait of the nation after a pandemic kills off most of its population (adapted as the HBO miniseries of the same title in 2021), to 2020’s The Glass Hotel, the story of a handful of people affected by the collapse of a Ponzi scheme. The Glass Hotel is a sort of alternate history to Station Eleven, set in a world where the “Georgia flu” has been successfully contained. Exit Party, Mandel’s lovely, meditative new novel, features a few characters apparently connected to the characters in those other books and amounts to yet another alternate future or, rather, two of them: one in which the U.S. falls apart, and one in which it endures but in a terrible form. Exit Party begins in the former version, following a 2031 coup d’état and the disintegration of the United States into a patchwork map of regional nations and city-states, “with ever-shifting borders and countless combatants, militias battling for control.” Released from an 18-year stint in prison, a 48-year-old woman named Ari cajoles her roommate, Gloria, into venturing out to a party thrown by Gloria’s friend, Kareem, to celebrate the lifting of curfew in Los Angeles, in the newly established Republic of California. The party feels like a mundane but still meaningful pleasure—people get dressed up, some of them get drunk, and Ari hooks up with a man she’s just met. But something about the party is “wrong,” as Kareem and Ari’s hookup put it. Doppelgangers of two of the guests, including Ari’s roommate, show up, confused and distressed, and sometime during that night, Kareem disappears entirely. Much later in Exit Party, a bit of handwaving about physics experiments involving quantum entanglement will be offered to explain what’s happened, but anyone even casually conversant in the common tropes of science fiction will soon realize that the doubles are visitors from an alternate version of our universe, one in which history has followed a very different course. 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. What if you didn’t go to that party? What if you never asked that sketchy dude next door if he knew anyone who was hiring? What if your parents had not abandoned you? What if you hadn’t checked into that hotel or let that young man you suspected of being an art thief into your Paris apartment? What if instead of growing up in a nation that fell apart, you lived in an authoritarian surveillance state, where bad-mouthing the government could result in a five-year sentence to a desert work camp? Some of these questions are matters of chance or fate, and some chew on the old puzzle of nature vs. nurture. Take the Ari of the first half of Exit Party, for example. She is an inveterate criminal who, even before the collapse of the U.S., was running a bogus passport scheme, and who ended up being convicted of taking out a contract on her own cousin. The Ari in the second half of the novel—a character the reader will eagerly look forward to meeting once the novel’s premise becomes clear—is a very different woman. Or is she? In this other version of the United States, a nation now ominously calling itself the United State, she lives a respectable life as a richly credentialed academic. But this Ari, who calls herself Ibari, is also a habitual liar; her very career depends on her ability to deceive. Furthermore, she discovers in herself an urge toward rule-breaking or, as she puts it, “a faint shadow of corruption. I could become a criminal, I realized, and there was freedom in that.” Both Aris are, as the original Ari puts it, “obsessed with freedom.” Both are struck when they encounter the phrase true diligence in a children’s detective novel, to the degree that one of them has the words tattooed on her arm. There’s some adventuring in Exit Party, and a resistance movement, and some pivotal terrorist attacks, and a stolen painting, and arms dealing, and forays into shanty towns, and ominous wastelands, but action isn’t really the novel’s concern. The ambient notion that the U.S. stands at the crossroads of authoritarianism and schism has clearly played into the book’s conception. The universe Ari inhabits reminded me a bit of Neal Stephenson’s 2019 novel Fall, or Dodge in Hell, in which the U.S. has splintered into two affluent, educated coastal regions divided by “Ameristan,” a lawless rural heartland full of religious fanatics driven mad by their unfiltered social media feeds, a place you can traverse only by hiring guides who drive armored cars with massive guns mounted on top. Stephenson’s novel—in classic science-fiction fashion—asks what the world would be like if certain social and technological trends continue. Mandel’s, instead, asks what sort of person such a world would produce. Chaos and what the government in Ibari’s universe refers to as “harmony” are the top options on offer in Exit Party, and each shapes Mandel’s characters in its own way. The mystery of the self is eternal, even if, as several characters in the novel note, nations are not. A third, more palatable option—despite the presumably infinite number of alternate universes that might have become entangled in that physics experiment—doesn’t seem to be on the table. “No country lasts forever,” Kareem tells Ibari in the novel’s second half, and she concludes there is “such hope in that,” an understandable sentiment, given the country she lives in. There’s a melancholy resignation to Exit Party, a sense that an ending is imminent, whatever version of America you happen to reside in, and also a sense that maybe this isn’t such a catastrophe after all. Science Fiction War