Is a dystopian novel automatically a form of mystery? Will any meaningful plunge into human quandary, loss, and occasional success result in chasing answers to crime, disaster, unfair aspects of being alive?
EXIT PARTY (301 pages, none of them wasted) is the seventh from the bicoastal Emily St. John Mandel. It opens in the year 2031, just five years from now. You can get a prime sense of the book from the opening sentence:
In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace.
An easy comparison for the book would be to call it a closer-in-time sideways approach to Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: It evokes the same sense of "we knew this could unfold next, didn't we?" Lives are less obviously at stake, but personal freedom belongs only to those that the State doesn't much notice. Surveillance is a fact of life. (My app-developing older son told me about 20 years ago that there was no longer privacy in our world. I've taken him seriously.)
Mandel shapes a double dystopian here: each with a version of what could take place in the next few years in our nation, our global community, our lives. Ari, short for Ibari, keeps being pinned by her own rebelliousness, which in one mirror could be independence and assertiveness, so a very good thing, and in another could reflect as anger and dangerous to the social order -- and to herself and the people connected with her.
Look for the threads that pull this book from spring blossoms and grace, to a finale that resonates like the warning bell and grief of Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Are we already seeing the Berlin Wall of our time, the leaders who self-sort between sacrifice and accumulation of wealth, and the forces ready to kill to preserve political assertions?
Don't miss this book.
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