History’s Afterparty: Review of Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party

Christian P. Haines Under Review:Exit Party. Emily St. John Mandel. Knopf, September 2026. Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel, Exit Party, manages to be one of the bleakest and most hopeful novels I’ve read in recent years. It has the nerve to date its post-apocalyptic United States to the year 2030, drawing a map of catastrophe that’s less premonition than extrapolation. If we keep heading in the direction we’re heading, we’ll end up with a United States fractured into warring states, governed by militias, impoverished in ways that Americans like to imagine only other countries can be—and sooner rather than later. Mandel presents not one but two dystopian visions of the US: the fractured country I’ve already mentioned, and a tech-driven surveillance state. Exit Party plays these parallel universes off of one another as if to suggest that multiplying two negatives could produce a positive. Mandel cultivates the capacity to imagine things otherwise; she writes with the conviction that…

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