SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Emily St. John Mandel's "Exit Party" opens with startling words from a world ahead.
EMILY ST JOHN MANDEL: (Reading) In the first spring, after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace. The trees bloomed in the same week that international peacekeeping troops withdrew from Los Angeles, and the convergence of flowers with the absence of foreign soldiers brought a delirious kind of hope. Everyone in the spring of 2031 knew the city was one terrorist attack away from disaster, but that peril made the season more vivid, not less.
SIMON: "Exit Party" is the latest novel from the author of "Station Eleven," "Sea of Tranquility" and "The Glass Hotel." Emily St. John Mandel joins us from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
MANDEL: It's such a pleasure, Scott. It's nice to talk to you again.
SIMON: Well, tell us about this world that you see ahead of us.
MANDEL: I like the deep sigh. That was evocative (laughter). You know, lately, I've been thinking about this in terms of meteorology. You listen to reports by climate scientists, and they will present you with a range of scenarios. This is what the world might look like if we're 3 degrees above our current temperature. This is what it looks like at 4 degrees, at 5, et cetera. Nobody can tell you which version is true, but all of those scenarios are possible on our current trajectory.
So that was how I'm - I was envisioning this book when I started writing it. I am not implying that there will be a second American civil war, but that is how the book opens. Actually - well, we opened in the aftermath, when the fighting stopped, and there is a new world emerging out of the chaos. The curfew is lifted in the city of Los Angeles - Republic of California - and my protagonist is headed out to a party.
SIMON: We learn within a few sentences, Ari - your protagonist - has been in prison for 18 years and not for shoplifting.
MANDEL: OK. This is a deep cut. Way back in 2010, I published a novel called "The Singer's Gun," and Ari was the villain of that story. She has unambiguously bad news in that book. But she was really interesting to me, and she was a character who I just found myself thinking about intermittently over the years and thinking, what would she be like at the other end of a very long prison sentence? So that was one of the starting points of the book for me.
SIMON: Party in the opening chapter. Guests seem to disappear and reappear as another manifestation of themselves. What's going on?
MANDEL: I've been fascinated for years now by the idea of the counter-life. It's the life where you went to a different school or married a different person or never started working at NPR or never became a novelist or whatever that inflection point was. And I think that if any of us look at our lives and think about those moments when we made one choice instead of another, if you kind of play that out a little bit, it's easy to imagine the life you didn't live. So something I was playing with a little bit in this book is, how might the tropes of science fiction map onto real life, onto actual reality? You know, you go to a party. Just for a second, the party functions as a kind of swing door between parallel universes and another you comes through.
SIMON: Do we all have a what-if version of ourselves?
MANDEL: I certainly do. I mean, look, I'm from rural western British Columbia, Canada. I don't have a high school diploma. It's a long, tedious story involving homeschooling and poor life choices but...
SIMON: You became a dancer, right?
MANDEL: I did. I became a dancer. Yeah. That was my first career.
SIMON: Yeah.
MANDEL: But, you know, on paper, those are not the conditions of a life that then puts me here in New York City as a novelist. So I have a feeling sometimes of my actual life being a little bit improbable, or there's, like, an implausibility about it, sometimes. So for me, it's very easy to imagine a counter-life or counter-lives.
SIMON: "Swan Dive" is a painting that figures throughout the novel. Does that become like another character for you?
MANDEL: I have a certain attachment to it. There're a couple of reasons why it's there. One is that I'm interested in the way art moves through time. There's a kind of interesting immortality in that for me. People form their own individual and sometimes quite emotional relationships with a work of art as it moves through decades and potentially even centuries from hand to hand.
And I also find that if you're writing a novel that's quite structurally complex - if you have multiple points of view, multiple characters and timelines - it can be useful just for the sake of narrative cohesion to have a something, an object that moves from hand to hand and between timelines and can act as a kind of throughline through the book.
SIMON: You know, one of the questions I had scrawled down here was how you keep everything straight.
MANDEL: I don't. My first draft is a mess (laughter). There is no plan. I - there was one novel, "The Glass Hotel," where I tried to do that kind of, like, detective on the trail of a serial killer style board. You know, you got the red yarn. You got the points of connection. You got the photos and the ideas. And it was kind of cumbersome and more trouble than it was worth. So I've abandoned that. I'm just trying to write a first draft and then revise obsessively - sometimes over a period of years - until it makes sense. So that is the entire process.
SIMON: May I ask how much time you spend in your other worlds?
MANDEL: What do you mean?
SIMON: Well, you're writing about other worlds. Is it immersed, or is it important for you to keep a distance from it as you describe it?
MANDEL: It's complicated because sometimes those other worlds are dark. There's a section of this novel that takes place in an authoritarian state.
SIMON: Yeah.
MANDEL: And I found that quite difficult and a little creepy to write about, especially given our current political situation. It was much harder to write about that when the ICE raids started happening in Minneapolis, in particular. And starting to see these conditions that I'd imagined would remain fictional, like the police disappearing people off the street, seeing those play out on the news was intensely unsettling and did make it difficult to stay immersed in that world.
One of the gifts of parenthood for me is you don't get to stay in that world for very long. You know, it's like, at a certain point, the school day ends, and you move on to making dinner, and you are very much grounded in day-to-day life. So sometimes I think that makes it a little bit easier. It's not actually possible for me to become immersed in any fictional world that I'm writing about in an uninterrupted way for days and days and days at a time.
SIMON: Let me ask you about something Ari says in the novel - what I'd learned in the disorder was to recognize good moments.
MANDEL: Yes. We last spoke at the height of the pandemic.
SIMON: Yep.
MANDEL: And that was something that I personally learned in the pandemic, how to recognize good moments - because sometimes the world outside is objectively terrible, but you have a lovely evening with your kid, you know, or a magical afternoon with friends. And those moments still happen even when the surrounding conditions are quite difficult. So there's something in this book about finding joy not just in difficult moments, but finding joy despite impermanence. Yeah. I love that idea. And this is the only book I've ever written where - I won't reveal the sentences because that is such a spoiler - the entire novel is summed up in the final three sentences of this book, which do relate to that idea.
SIMON: Emily St. John Mandel's latest novel, "Exit Party." Thank you so much for being with us.
MANDEL: Thank you.
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