Book reviews: ‘Exit Party’ and ‘Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy’

'Exit Party' by Emily St. John Mandel

“Let’s hope that Emily St. John Mandel’s gift for writing prophetic fiction is overrated,” said Maureen Corrigan in NPR .org. Station Eleven, the Canadian novelist’s 2014 breakthrough, anticipated the outbreak of a worldwide pandemic. Unsettlingly, her “ingenious, eerie, and complex” new work opens in 2031 in the immediate wake of the collapse of the United States. Fighting by then has subsided enough that Ari Waker, a woman in Los Angeles who’s recently completed a well-earned 18-year prison stint, feels safe enough to attend a party. There, by some strange accident, two guests from an alternative world materialize while the host vanishes into that same other dimension, where the U.S. isn’t violently riven but is instead a placid authoritarian state with a citizenry under constant surveillance.

Despite its science fiction framework, Exit Party, “like all the best stories,” is character driven, said Adam Begley in The Atlantic. In its first half, we follow Ari as she rapidly reinvents herself again and again, graduating from dishwasher to gunrunner, trophy wife, philanthropist, and Paris-based art collector. The second half throws us into the other timeline, where Ari’s doppelgänger, known as Ibari, is a high-ranking undercover operative willing to disappear fellow citizens that pose challenges to the authoritarian government. Though these twinned protagonists act immorally, Mandel makes both Ari and Ibari compelling and sympathetic. And as in her previous novels, “the underlying theme is irresistible: how shockingly little humanity understands about the sudden swerves and reversals that shape a life—or end it.”

With its shifting time frames and stories nesting within stories, said Ron Charles in his Substack newsletter, “Exit Party sometimes feels dazzling and sometimes feels like it was composed by a squirrel with a Ph.D.” Still “it grows more satisfying with every page” as we follow Ari and Ibari’s misadventures. “The only worldbuilder more efficient than Mandel may be God,” because she sketches each of her parallel dystopias in “a few deft strokes,” then immerses us in individual lives made complex by the particular circumstances in which those lives unfold. It’s not always easy to understand exactly what’s happening in Exit Plan, and “anybody who promises you definitive clarity on this mind-bending story should be regarded with the suspicion reserved for Instagram health experts.” Ari struggles to understand how its two worlds connect, and as events in one world echo events in the other, so will many readers. “Mandel has engineered this uncanny novel to spark déjà vu, to send you flipping back to passages you read too quickly, to drive you mad. But what a way to go!”

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'Redwood: The Untold Story of the Cold War’s Most Extraordinary Spy' by Ben Macintyre

“Ben Macintyre has made an illustrious career of taking dusty government archives and transforming them into propulsive nonfiction thrillers,” said Joseph Finder in The New York Times. With his new account about a Soviet spy who may have altered history, the author of Operation Mincemeat, which was adapted into a 2021 movie, “has done it again.” In 1981, KGB major Vladimir Kuzichkin offered to slip secrets about Soviet meddling in post-revolution Iran to British intelligence, but not because of ideology or money. It was because he suffered from erectile dysfunction and hoped Western doctors could help. Might Iran have fallen into Soviet hands had Viagra already existed? Macintyre floats that “audacious” thought, but his tale doesn’t rest on such speculation.

Think of Redwood as “an artfully constructed nonfiction equivalent to one of John le Carré’s most accomplished novels,” said Andrew Nagorski in The Wall Street Journal. The author traces the life paths that brought Kuzichkin and his MI6 handler, Ian McCredie, together, making them allies in documenting how Moscow was seeking to use the communist Tudeh Party to topple Ayatollah Khomeini and install its own puppet leader. MI6, with the CIA’s approval, then handed this intel to Khomeini, knowing full well that he might kill or lock up thousands of Tudeh members Kuzichkin had identified. And that’s what happened, strengthening the ayatollah’s grip on power. By then, Kuzichkin had been spirited away to the U.K., where he died of a heart attack years later next to an empty bottle of vodka.

“There’s much to like in Redwood,” said Boris Starling in The Telegraph (U.K.). But “there are two minor flaws.” First, the background narrative, with its abundance of characters that don’t merit being named, “seems at times unnecessarily complex.” Second, the entire story is less exciting and fraught than the one Macintyre told in 2018’s masterful The Spy and the Traitor. Still, Macintyre remains “incapable of writing a dull sentence,” specializing in “deliciously wry” turns of phrase. In Kuzichkin, he’s also found another “wildly unforgettable” character.