Near-future U.S. the setting for surreal dual-world storyline

It’s not every day you encounter a seriously intended literary novel that attempts to dramatize a mind-bending physics theory like quantum entanglement.

But then the B.C.-born-and-raised Emily St. John Mandel is not your everyday Canadian literary writer.

In her late 40s, she has lived in the U.S. for her entire writing career. She is best known for her 2014 dystopian novel Station Eleven, about a Shakespearean acting troupe navigating a pandemic-ravaged America.

Her new outing, her seventh, Exit Party, shares DNA with detective and sci-fi genres more than with conventional literary fiction.

It begins in Los Angeles in 2031, when the U.S. has been sundered by civil war and California has just declared itself a standalone republic.

The main character, Ari Waker, attends a house party to celebrate the recent lifting of wartime curfews.

At 48, she has just been released from 18 years in prison (not a common trope in polite Canadian literary fiction). She had hired a hitman to kill her cousin in Brooklyn with whom she had operated a business smuggling humans and faking passports.

The civil-war premise is in the U.S. air these days, for the obvious reasons. But Exit Party has a strong fantastical element that calls to mind TV’s The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror more than, say, writer Kurt Andersen’s new political satire The Breakup.

Ari notices strange things at the L.A. party. She meets a woman who appears to have changed clothes between rooms. A painting goes missing from a wall. The host disappears mysteriously.

The house, it appears, serves as some kind of portal to another world, an alternative universe perhaps, where several characters, Ari among them, lead parallel lives in radically different circumstances.

Mandel divides the novel in half, with an “A-side” and a “B-side,” like some kind of retro vinyl album. In the latter, America is the singular “United State,” an Orwellian surveillance state for whom Ari (now known as “Ibari”) is a paid agent.

As bizarre as this sounds, Mandel is working with actual scientific theories of quantum mechanics that imply the existence of the so-called multiverse.

She has a more conventional literary intent as well. Which makes for a better life, she asks, a free society that leads to the chaos of civil breakdown or the regulation of a police state that at least offers stability?

Mandel readers know that her plots do not unspool in linear fashion. Exit Party’s is no exception.

In fact, most of the cleverness of this novel is in the way it loops back and forth through time and space. It charts the characters’ lifespans, children, jobs. It moves into Europe and even briefly to the moon. Mandel plants clues throughout, like the “premonitions” Ari experiences.

There are lots of secondary characters. It can be hard to keep track of who’s who and in what version of reality they belong.

Also fun is Mandel’s playful continuation of her own literary multiverse. The crime for which Ari served her prison term (as well as Ari herself) will be familiar to readers of the author’s 2009 novel, The Singer’s Gun.

The artist Lucas Alkaitis, whose painting Swan Dive figures here, is the deceased older brother of the businessman in The Glass Hotel from 2020. The moon colony seems to be the same one in 2023’s Sea of Tranquility.

People do not read Mandel for her pretty prose. It is undistinguished; sometimes it seems almost careless. But perhaps the repetition of common words and even sentences is meant to mirror her literary multiverse.

Her title, on the other hand, is perfect. Exit Party is one of those ingeniously plotted novels that would reward an immediate re-reading, to pick up details you missed the first time around.

Morley Walker is a retired Free Press writer and editor.