Emily St. John Mandel's new novel 'Exit Party' builds on favorite themes in her 'Mandelverse'
NEW YORK (AP) — After seven novels that span centuries, continents and even planets, Emily St. John Mandel has not only created a substantial body of work, but a universe unto herself — what admirers like to call the Mandelverse.
“It means that the novels, although they can be read entirely alone and independently, have this web of connections between them,” the author said during a recent interview at a cafe on Manhattan's Upper East Side. “I think it’s fair to say that I have certain interests and I’ll build on that and build on that and build on that over time.”
Artists have been known to say that a given work is the culmination of what preceded it, and Mandel's latest, “Exit Party,” gathers characters and themes that readers of “Station Eleven,” “Sea of Tranquility” and other novels will recognize. Her narrative weaves together two genres she has long been known for, crime fiction and science fiction, and continues Mandel's explorations of chaos, identity, impermanence and transcendence.
Like “Station Eleven,” the new book is set in a post-traumatic future. Mandel begins in Los Angeles in 2031, when Ari Waker (previously seen in Mandel's 2010 novel “The Singer's Gun”) has been released from prison and the United States has broken apart. The story continues over the succeeding decades, as alternative lives are revealed and the rules of society blur to the point where Mandel writes that being a criminal or joining the police are “two sides of the same coin.”
Mandel’s own life at times seems recorded in stereo. She has dual Canadian-U.S. citizenship, lives in New York and Los Angeles with her wife Laura Barisonzi (she was previously married to Kevin Mandel) and is active as a novelist and screenwriter. (She is working on adaptations of “Last Night in Montreal” and “Exit Party.”)
Born Emily St. John Fairbanks, the 47-year-old author has been imagining alternate and faraway worlds for much of her life, an impulse she attributes in part to growing up for years in a small community on Canada's Denman Island. Unlike so many of her peers, she never formally studied literature or even took a creative writing course. Her education falls just short of graduating high school; she dropped out to pursue her first career choice, dance, at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre.
“Nothing on paper points to this life, but here we are,” she says.
Mandel had published three novels before “Station Eleven,” which came out in 2014 and found her switching publishers from the independent Unbridled Books to the Penguin Random House imprint Alfred A. Knopf. Jenny Jackson, Mandel’s editor at Knopf, remembers hearing about the author and the following she had developed among booksellers well before Mandel’s agent sent her the manuscript for “Station Eleven” and told her it was “much bigger” than anything she had done before.
“I loved the book,” Jackson says. “Here was this author who already had grassroots support and I knew she was poised to break out.”
Mandel's futuristic story of a world ravaged by a lethal flu virus was already a bestseller and National Book Award finalist six years before the coronavirus pandemic gave it the unwanted status of prophecy. “Station Eleven” has sold more than 1 million copies, was adapted into an HBO miniseries and ranked in a New York Times author survey as among the 21st century's best books.
During her interview, Mandel discussed a few turning points in her life, the appeal of recurring characters and why she finds hope even when conceiving the worst.
Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
MANDEL: I feel like I've become a better writer. “The Singer’s Gun” was so long ago and I was much more likely to question myself, not wanting to go too far out of literary or noir lines. At this point in my career, I feel a real sense of freedom. I feel like I can write in whatever genre I want.
MANDEL: It’s an idea I’ve loved for a while, the life you didn’t live, where you married a different person, went to a different school, took a different job. So over the passage of time, that would turn you into a somewhat different person. Look, I trained as a dancer. It’s easy to imagine a version of my life where I kept dancing and stayed in Canada.
MANDEL: I’ve been writing since I was a little kid, since I was 9. I loved it, but I saw it as a hobby. I had this ridiculous situation where I came from a very working class family, and I took a nondegree conservatory program in contemporary dance. So I graduated with a mountain of student loans, and it’s like a worst-case scenario, very poor planning on my part.
I didn’t want to work in retail forever. I was working in the back room of a store (in Montreal), just putting stickers on martini glasses for 15 hours. That wasn’t something I exactly wanted to do. So I thought, “Well, what comes next?” And I thought, “Maybe I should start writing.”
MANDEL: I was afraid of being pigeonholed. To be clear, I have huge respect for crime writers, but I didn't want to get pigeonholed.
MANDEL: Yeah, I think my next book needs to not be speculative fiction.
MANDEL: I think there will be multiple ruptures and lots of pleasant interludes in between.
MANDEL: Yeah, can you find beauty in impermanence? That's what I’m trying to drive toward. We need to find peace with the idea that nothing lasts forever.
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