It’s 2031, and the U.S. has ‘come undone’ in Emily St. John Mandel’s ‘Exit Party’

Knopf

Emily St. John Mandel is a novelist celebrated for, among other things, her prescience. Station Eleven, her best-known novel, was published in 2014. When the pandemic hit globally in 2020, critics and readers began to remark on how Station Eleven anticipated the pandemic, given that its dystopian plot is set in motion by the outbreak of a worldwide virus.

Let’s hope that Mandel’s gift for writing prophetic fiction is overrated, because her latest novel, Exit Party, opens with