Ling Ma

Reader/reviewers seem to have lobbed a number of criticisms at Severance, and, by and large, they're pretty much spot-on. "Severance" is an immigrant narrative and a post-apocalyptic zombie story and a coming-of-age-in-hipster-Brooklyn-in-the-oughts novel, and its disparate parts don't really blend together all that well. The novel can't quite make up its mind as to what it wants to be. The cult leader we meet could have been more compelling. The ending could have been better. Ling Ma writes show more well, but she's just not writer that Colson Whitehead is.

But I rather liked "Severance" because Ma managed to take her story into some very interesting thematic directions. Her main character, Candace Chen, has led a disjointed life: orphaned in young adulthood, she's a Chinese immigrant who grew up in Utah and expected to find something better in New York City. Candace's parents seem to have adapted in superficial ways but, cut off from their homeland and their families, don't often seem like all that emotionally well-developed. "Severance" would seem to be an obvious title for a narrative like this one. But while a lot of literature attempts to teach its readers how to draw strength from the past, Ma's attitude seems to be more conflicted. In a book that features zombies repeating the same actions they did in life until their bodies run down, the past often seems more of a danger than a resource. Candace's life in Brooklyn was unsatisfactory -- she was lonely and worked a job that was prestigious but not really remunerative or meaningful. Her boyfriend's hipster poverty seems increasingly threadbare by the time he leaves New York and he epidemic hits, leaving Candace without a job and without direction. Ultimately, her challenge, it might be said, is to try to find a livable present and a viable future. Sometimes, Ma seems to be arguing, it's impossible to draw a solid through-line that connects all your experiences, and you have to make do. Sometimes severance is necessary.

The other element of this book that impressed me was the way it addresses the strange contradictions global capitalism. Candace is Chinese-born and speaks a respectable Mandarin, but she's a foreigner in China and her counterparts and the printing company she deals with don't hesitate to let her know that they're aware of how they're being exploited. This ties Candace and the book's Chinese characters -- and, by extension, the rest of us -- together in uncomfortable ways. Saying that epidemics don't respect borders is pretty much a medical fact -- and these days, it's a lesson learned -- but Ma seems to be arguing that the exploitative elements of global capitalism can't be contained by borders either. She subtly demonstrates that everybody in the book is part of the same machine. Guilt and complicity are also unavoidably contagious. Yes, even her would-be writer boyfriend, who refuses to take jobs that threaten his "integrity." In this sense, the zombie epidemic provides Candace and her yet-to-be-born baby with a means of escape from a whole set of seemingly unresolvable problems: her boring job, her dying relationship, the standard immigrant dream she was more-or-less born into. It'd be nice, frankly, if our pandemic could open up the same sort of possibilities for us. We'll have to wait and see.

In closing, I will have to say that I rather liked Candace herself as a character. She's not, it must be said, the most fascinating person that I've met in a book, but I think that her very ordinariness is somewhat deliberate. At one point, Candace's mother implores her to "be of use," and in many ways, Candace is: she's hard working, responsible, and preternaturally efficient. A product of her background, then. She spends much of "Severance" learning that that, in itself, might not be enough. I can't say that she opens up, exactly, over the course of this novel, but, by the end of it, she has a better idea of her former life's limitations. This a problematic novel, but also one that I can recommend to those interested in immigrant narratives and transcultural stories. show less

I discover many great reads from listening to the New York Times Book Review podcast. I picked up Severance after hearing the host and NYT Book Review editor Pamela Paul, talk about it during the segment where she and other reviewers talk about what they are currently reading. I put it on hold (pre-pandemic) at the library but by the time it came in a couple of weeks ago, I had forgotten what it was about. It turns out, it’s about a global pandemic! I read it anyway, dubious that I could show more enjoy it given the state the world is in currently, and I’m glad I did. On the surface, Severance could be classified as a zombie apocalypse book but in actuality, it’s much more. It’s also about the immigrant experience and late-stage capitalism.

This book was published in 2018, making the similarities to today quite eerie. It’s a good thing I’m not a conspiracy theorist. A fungal infection out of China called the Shen Fever is sweeping the world. As the fever spreads in the US, the government becomes less forthcoming with the information about the death toll. People are urged to wear masks but not everyone does. Tourists continue to come to New York as the fever spreads. The New York Times prints the names of the dead on its homepage. I could go on.

A person infected with Shen Fever performs the same mundane task over and over until they die. For instance, Candace observes a fevered woman working at an abandoned Juicy Couture store folding sweatpants over and over. She has been there doing that for so long that half her jaw has rotted off.

Candace Chen is one of the last people to leave New York. Before the fever takes over, she works at a publishing company in the Bible division, with basically the same routine every day. She keeps coming into work long after her coworkers have left both their jobs and the city. When she does finally quit, she joins a group of survivors on their way to a place their leader calls The Facility, where they can start a new society.

Candace’s journey with them is only part of her story. She immigrated to the US from China as a child. Growing up the daughter of immigrants has always set her somewhat apart from her friends and coworkers in New York. The book alternates between three timelines – Candace’s present day journey with the group, her recent past in New York before the fever hit and her childhood. There is a lot going on in a fairly slim novel. Fair warning -the ending is not going to be for everyone. I didn’t care for it at first but the more I thought about it, the more I felt it was appropriate. Recommended. show less

Reading a pandemic novel during a pandemic is a bit too on the nose, but "Severance" is more than just a post-apocalyptic horror; it's a well-structured, beautifully crafted meditation on nostalgia as differentiated from memory, and on the habits that keep us going long after it was time to have stopped. The gradual/sudden collapse of society is presented in a way that is quite affecting now, as we watch familiar things around us change slowly and abruptly all at once.

'Severance' is not your typical post-apocalyptic thriller. If you're after a plague-based version of 'The Walking Dead', this isn't the book you're looking for. If you're looking for a book that explores being rootless, severed from your past, barely invested in your present and unable to imagine a future more satisfying than the habits and routines of your daily life, then 'Severance' will resonate with you.

'Severance' is a first-person account of the life of Candace Chen, who immigrated to show more America from China with her parents when she was a child and who, when the virus that changes everything hits the world, is in her twenties, working for a publishing firm in NYC, managing the logistics of outsourcing the printing of specialist Bibles to China.

'Severance' was published in the summer of 2018 but it reads eerily like a book written after having lived through the first wave of COVID in 2020. It imagines something called Shen Fever because it is believed to have originated in China. The early symptoms are very similar to those of COVID, so are just as hard to pin down. Ling Ma's description of the reaction of the government, companies and the general public to the fever now read like a summary of recent history. The fever she imagines is worse than COVID, not just because its rate of infection is very high but because what it does to people is cruel and deeply disturbing. She captures the slow slide from normalcy, through this-is-a-manageable-problem, through until-things-get-back-to-normal-we're-going-to-do-this-to-stay-safe, to the-world-we-knew-is-gone-and-it's-not-coming-back is lubricated by denial, self-deception and the persistence of hope even as people begin to drown in despair.

Yet, the plausible depiction of the apocalypse, chilling as it is, is not where the power of the book comes from. Ling Ma uses the global discontinuity produced by the Shen Fever pandemic as a large scale example of how we can become severed from the life we've always told ourselves we would have. That we can deny or ignore a 'severance' on the scale of the pandemic and tell ourselves that things will get back to normal shows the strength of our attachment to the lives we've imagined for ourselves in the face of evidence that it's not a life we will be able to lead. The pandemic reminded me of Michelle Obama's assertion that 'Being President doesn't change who you are, it reveals who you are.' 'Severance' recognises that we don't become new people in the face of discontinuous change. Rather, we reveal the essential reality of who we are as the dreams of who we might become and the pretences of daily life fall away.

'Severance' refuses to sink into the comfort of post-apocalyptic tropes in which crisis brings out the best and the worst in people, transforming them into heroes or villains. Instead, it blurs the lines between life before and after the apocalypse. It shows Shen Fever as just the biggest of a series of 'severances' in the life of Candace Chen and her parents. Her parents are severed from their culture and family and history in China. Candace's life in NYC is completely discontinuous from her childhood in Salt Lake City. Even before the pandemic hit, Candace was starting to recognise the gap between the NYC life she'd imagined and the one she was actually living. She's also aware that while she is good at the work she does and it in a place where that work is valued, she doesn't value what she does and this makes her life feel hollow.

Candace's story is told as a series of non-linear descriptions, driven forward by a growing sense of threat in her post-apocalypse life. A threat that will force her to abandon her habitual passivity and make difficult choices about how she will live.

We learn of Candace's childhood as the daughter of immigrant parents, one of whom embraces living in America while the other constantly mourns what has been left behind. We see how her life in NYC is not the dream she had hoped for but is rootless and unsatisfying. We watch the slow normalisation of loneliness and isolation. We see inertia slipping into apathy and then into terminal depression in a life held together by a mixture of distraction and routine and a denial of the possibility of choice.

I liked that Candace was the same person, with many of the same challenges, before and after Shen Fever hit and she found herself one of a handful of survivors.

Over the course of the book, Candace slowly starts to understand how adrift she had been. How she had become a passive observer of her own life. Even her blog of NYC photographs, her only real passion, is titled NYGhost, a name that comes to apply both to her and the city she is photographing. The post-apocalypse plotline puts Candace in a situation where she can remain passive, surrender agency, let go of identity and do what is required of her or she can take a risk. It struck me, as I'm sure it was supposed to, that many of us have found ourselves in that situation but without the stark light of an apocalypse to make the dilemma visible.

'Severance' is not an exciting book. The pace is gentle. The tone is passive. There is no escapism, only an unflinching look at how things are. I found the combination to be chilling and compelling. show less