Frayed Futures

Much in the seventh novel by Emily St. John Mandel will feel familiar to her readers: An inexplicable disappearance that reverberates across decades. People searching for home or comfort after traumatic loss. Jumps in time and shifts in perspective. The accumulated familiarity is enough that, when I read it, I observed for the first time a formulaic tendency in Mandel’s writing. Even so, by the poignant ending, I was struck by her ability to find fresh insights in such recognizable terrain.

Like her previous two books, The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility, Exit Party opens with a vanishing. At a Los Angeles party in 2031, shortly after the collapse of the United States government, Kareem enters his kitchen and never walks out again. This mystery becomes the precipitating event from which the story unfolds.

At first, our guide to the aftermath is Ari, an ex-convict just out of prison and one of the last people to see Kareem...