In her second novel, 2009’s The Singer’s Gun, Emily St John Mandel tells the story of Anton Waker, a young man desperate to make a break from his criminal family. His plans are thwarted by his cousin Ari, whose hard-nosed talent for operating outside the law has become a way of life. A decade later in The Glass Hotel, a painting called Swan Dive that hangs in the lobby of the luxury retreat stands as a symbol of escape from a trap that is closing.
You will not need to have read either of these earlier novels to enjoy Mandel’s seventh, Exit Party, though their loose intertwining of narrative threads will provide extra pleasure and a sense of homecoming for those who have. It is also interesting to observe Mandel’s evolution from a writer of quirky tales of offbeat protagonists to a novelist whose world-spanning, politically resonant narratives now attract a wide and devoted following. Exit Party begins five years into our future, in 2031.
Ari Waker has just come out of prison after serving an 18-year sentence for the attempted murder by contract killing of her cousin Anton. Much has changed while she has been inside: a second civil war has devastated lives and blighted the economy, and the United States as such has ceased to exist. As the novel opens, the newly inaugurated independent State of California is celebrating the end of violence and the lifting of curfews.
Ari and her flatmate Gloria have been invited to a party at the home of Gloria’s friend, Kareem. Ari has the feeling that she is meant to be there; she has experienced such premonitions before, and learned to trust them. Arriving at Kareem’s home, she has the sense that something strange is happening.
A woman she’s never met before addresses her as Ibari – the name that is legally hers but never used. A painting disappears from the wall. Someone else talks of “extra people” and of the party being “a door that swings both ways”.
But Ari does not have time to dwell on the incident. Forced back on her own resources, she spends the next few years working menial jobs, all the time with the underlying sense that there is a different future waiting for her, if she can only reach it: “It wasn’t that she thought she deserved more than what she had … it was just that she’d once had a considerable amount of money, her own business, and a beautiful apartment in a tower in New York City”. Old habits die hard, and it is not long before Ari falls back into criminal company.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
