How a Shelved ‘The Glass Hotel’ Adaptation Helped Emily St. John Mandel Write Her New Novel
Emily St. John Mandel used unexpected downtime in Los Angeles to develop Exit Party while working on a television adaptation of The Glass Hotel. Although the adaptation was shelved amid upheaval at HBO and Warner Bros., the experience helped her combine political anxieties about a possible second Trump presidency with the return of Ari, a character from The Singer’s Gun. The resulting speculative novel explores the aftermath of a fractured United States rather than the precise events that caused its collapse.
Exit Party is set in a near-future dystopia where the US government has fallen, Los Angeles has become a refugee camp, and a citywide curfew has recently been lifted. Ari discovers a portal to an alternate Los Angeles that has become a surveillance state, allowing Mandel to examine contrasting political futures. Mandel says she expects readers and interviewers to bring their own anxieties to the book, much as Station Eleven gained new significance during the Covid-19 pandemic.
- A cancelled adaptation helped inspire Mandel’s politically charged new novel.
- Exit Party imagines America after governmental collapse and civil conflict.
- The story focuses on consequences and competing dystopian futures.