The Light is Gorgeous While It Lasts
Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel (Penguin Random House, 2026)
Reviewed by Sarah Linville
Emily St. John Mandel’s rise to fame has been somewhat unconventional. She released her first novel, Last Night in Montreal, in 2009, and published two more literary crime novels in the years following: The Singer’s Gun in 2010 and The Lola Quartet in 2012. Her real breakthrough came with her 2014 novel Station Eleven, which follows a theatre and musical troupe called “The Traveling Symphony”as they perform Bach and Shakespeare in communities decimated by a flu pandemic. Unlike most novels released these days, Station Eleven enjoyed two distinct peaks of success, six years apart—a rare feat that has cemented Mandel’s reputation as a writer to watch.
Station Eleven won the Toronto Book Award in October 2015 and was nominated for the National Book Award the same year. It achieved respectable success from a sales perspective. In 2020, the novel enjoyed a resurgence of popularity as readers turned to Mandel to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This made Mandel uncomfortable. She initially turned down requests to talk about the pandemic, telling Esquire in 2021, “I felt like if I did any of those assignments, there would be this whiff of using the pandemic to move units of Station Eleven, which just felt so gross. I really resisted talking about it in any public way. I felt uncomfortable being cast as an expert.”
At the same time, perhaps serendipitously, Mandel was about to release her next novel, The Glass Hotel. Despite the focus on her new work, her Zoom book tour stops nearly always ended with questions about Station Eleven and the pandemic. Eventually, she gave in. After all, using art to make sense of the world around is a key theme of Station Eleven, and indeed of Mandel’s wider oeuvre. As Adrienne Westenfeld writes in Esquire, “Station Eleven celebrates that which allows us not just to survive, but to live: making art, belonging to something bigger than ourselves, searching tirelessly for what it means to be human.” Her interview with Esquire is just one place where Mandel has taken on a more public role in discussions surrounding COVID-19.
Meanwhile, our own real-life pandemic gave her the time to write her next novel, Sea of Tranquility, which came out in 2022. Sea of Tranquility is a novel that defies time and space. It features a cast of characters and settings ranging from early-twentieth-century Vancouver to a futuristic colony on the moon. Characters from The Glass Hotel show up here, and Mandel even nearly writes herself into the novel in the form of Olive Llewellyn, an author who also writes about pandemics before experiencing one herself (perhaps the same pandemic the world experienced in Station Eleven?).
All of this backstory, and indeed Mandel’s textual ecology as a whole, is important for understanding her latest work, Exit Party. The novel begins in 2031 and opens with the first of its two parallel stories, an “A-Side” and a “B-Side.” On the A-Side, roommates Ari and Gloria are headed to a party at Gloria’s friend Kareem’s house to celebrate the end of curfew in the Republic of California, an autonomous state located in the recently collapsed United States. When they arrive at the party, everything is normal. Soon, however, typical Mandelian events start to occur: doppelgangers appear, other people disappear, and it all seems to hinge on a painting called Swan Dive, which portrays a person in the top corner of the painting diving into a deep blue body of water.
After the party’s dramatic conclusion, Ari must leave L.A. to find work elsewhere, eventually ending up in the much more dangerous American Midwest. Here, militias still fight for control and food remains scarce, leading many characters (including Ari) to turn to crime for survival. She eventually runs to a marginally more stable Europe, still haunted by the events of the party and their impact on Gloria in particular.
On the B-Side, a woman named Ibari works to ascend the ranks within the International Security State, the Big Brother-esque organization that governs her version of the collapsed world. She doesn’t always know why she is placed where she is, but soon her work, too, seems to center on Swan Dive. It is linked to the disappearance of another agent in the service, Nico. Both stories intersect around the idea of who owns the painting, who has it in their possession at any given time, and what its existence on both sides of the novel says about the nature of reality.
Exit Party is Mandel’s most sustained exploration of the value of art in society. Even amidst the instability of a fractured U.S. and the forced stability of the surveillance-state version, the question of what makes a meaningful life is central. Do characters need to save the world in order to matter? Do they need to take down an autocratic government? Do they need to have a statue erected because of their scientific discovery? Or is it enough to work retail and care for children who need it? No matter the character’s choice, to Mandel, it seems that each life is equally mundane and meaningful. And, amidst all these questions is Swan Dive, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing among the characters at different stages of their life, sometimes in unconventional ways.
For example, even as Ibari considers whether she will leave her surveillance job or go further up the chain, she spends a lot of time doing the day-to-day work of her cover, a college professor. So, she spends a lot of time grading papers in the botanical garden near the university where she is teaching. Ibari is particularly struck by the garden’s waterfall and remembers, “When I wasn’t there, I missed the waterfall’s rushing white noise. I thought, I want to dive into the freezing water. A strange idea that came out of nowhere, and where on the Southern California coast could one even find an ice-water pool with a diving board? I wasn’t sure that such a thing existed. But the idea stayed with me” (208). While Ibari hasn’t yet seen Swan Dive herself, its central image seems to transcend alternate realities. The “why” beyond this phenomenon is never made entirely clear—it’s part of Mandel’s puzzle. Like the art in Station Eleven, Swan Dive doesn’t provide the answers to the problems these characters are facing, but it does provide comfort. It is a window toward the transcendent, to a common human experience of longing for something more.
One of the most enjoyable parts of the novel is its puzzle element: tracking who belongs where and why, which pieces echo their twin on the novel’s other side, and how the characters relate to characters and ideas from Mandel’s other novels, another fascinating layer to the story. Despite the confusion such layers could elicit, the plot is still engrossing, and her prose allows the reader to enter the minds of doppelgangers Ari and Ibari with ease—their inner worlds are similar enough to validate their twinning and yet distinct enough to allow the reader to differentiate. For example, when Ari and Felix arrive in Greece and attempt to break into a fenced-off area behind their hotel, Ari thinks, “we were Americans, which is another way of saying that chaos felt like home” (87). Later, shortly after the reader meets Ibari, who is contemplating her level of involvement in the surveillance state, she thinks, “The surprise wasn’t that chaos had always been there. The surprise was that I liked it” (207). Ibari’s society lacks any kind of national identity that Ari seems to cling to amidst the chaos of her collapsed country, but hints of the same (or at least a very similar) person exist in both. The characters’ similar propensities and differing motivations create near-endless invitations for comparison and parallel tracking. But both characters’ arcs are enjoyable enough even if these puzzle pieces are ignored.
In some sense, Exit Party offers two grim outlooks for the near future. 2031 is not far away, and both possibilities Mandel offers—a collapsed society or a surveillance state—are equally unappealing. However, her take is different than the classic question of whether our current reality more resembles 1984 or Brave New World. Those types of dystopias offer warnings of what could happen and reminders of what still matters. So, too, does Exit Party, but through her characters and through the metaverse of her body of work, Mandel points toward the hope the arts can offer us no matter our circumstance. Exit Party’s ending scene offers a meditation on beauty, art, and temporality, with the novel’s closing line being “The point is that the light is gorgeous while it lasts” (301). No matter our circumstance, whether in the midst of a devastating pandemic or a totalitarian regime, Mandel seems to argue, we can build a meaningful life. May we all look for that light.
Sarah Selden Linville earned her bachelor's in English and secondary education at Palm Beach Atlantic University and her master's in English and American studies at the University of Oxford. She has taught English in Palm Beach County, in Spain on a Fulbright grant, and currently teaches in Littleton, Colorado.
