Emily St. John Mandel’s novels remind me of swimming swimming pools. Her seven works of fiction—which embrace “The Glass Lodge,” “Sea of Tranquility,” and “Station Eleven,” the 2014 pandemic novel that grew to become a sensation through the first wave of COVID-19 (and was tailored into an award-winning HBO present in 2021)—characteristic sliding-door realities and a pointy sense of contingency. Her characters are usually escape artists and flight dangers, poised at any second to float into being another person, someplace else. Her writing has an aqueous high quality: issues slip or ripple or maintain a delicate glow; rain mists down; ships glide ahead within the night time. She repeats evocative photos—a personality swan-diving into water, for instance—investing them with cumulative that means. This piling, as a lot as her propulsive, suspenseful plots, helps the books’ slow-burning sense of revelation.
“Exit Celebration,” Mandel’s newest novel, launched yesterday, is a sublime, gracefully written crime story with sci-fi shadings. It’s set in 2031, and presents two parallel time strains that remark in reverse methods on up to date politics. Within the first of those, the USA has disintegrated into warring territories, its contested zones overrun by militias. The second half unfolds in an authoritarian surveillance state—“my homeland had closed like a fist,” one character says. Her title is Ari, and the novel’s multiversal machinations permit her to play each cop and robber. When Mandel introduces her, in Half 1, she’s simply been launched from jail (she took out a contract on her cousin), and is quickly drawn again into an underworld of gun runners, counterfeiters, and mercenaries.
Mandel’s characters are attuned to magnificence, in nature and in wonderful artwork, and her sentences share this aesthetic orientation. She doesn’t write what is usually regarded as literary fiction a lot as puzzle-box novels with a literary filigree; the complexity, friction, and ugliness of realist fiction, particularly, would perturb the works’ single fluid notice. Some readers might chafe at “Exit Celebration” ’s chicly urbane protagonists, lots of them engaging prodigies who every appear to symbolize a special ethnic group, or perhaps at her alternative of villains—alternately, violent militiamen, brokers of the totalitarian authorities, and fathers who don’t pull their weight on youngster care. Honest sufficient. I nonetheless gulped the e-book down.
For extra: learn Waldman on Mandel, from 2022.
