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A Novel
by Ling Ma
Book Reviewed by:Maybe it's the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma's offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance.
Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she's had her fill of uncertainty. She's content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.
So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.
Candace won't be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They're traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?
A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma's Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it's a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.
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1
The End begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary. I had gone over to my boyfriend's place in Greenpoint directly after work. I liked to stay over on hot summer nights because the basement was cool and damp at night. We made dinner, veggie stir-fry with rice. We had showered and watched a movie projected on his wall.
The screening was Manhattan, which I'd never seen before, and even though I found the May–December romance between Mariel Hemingway and Woody Allen kind of creepy, I loved all the opening shots of New York set to the Gershwin soundtrack, and I loved the scene in which Woody Allen and Diane Keaton get caught in the rain in Central Park, and they seek shelter in the Museum of Natural History, wet and cocooned in the cavern darkness of the planetary display. Just looking at New York on the screen, the city was made new for me again, and I saw it as I once did in high school: romantic, shabby, not totally gentrified, full of promise. It made me ...
Ling Ma's Severance feels both like a novel of a particular time and one that hasn't aged at all. It was published in 2018, while the main events of the book are understood to mostly take place around 2011, in a world where a pandemic infects humanity with a transformative virus. Looking back, the period during which the book is set now seems like an era when American society was at a peak of naive unsustainability, and the point of its publication seems to mark the beginning of a societal fracturing that was just becoming visible on a large scale. If the Obama era was a time when some clung fervently to the belief that humans could fix an exploitative, extractive world with what passes for representative democracy, many others understood a long time ago, were forced to understand, that the idea of progress itself was built on a flawed premise. So what now? Severance seems to ask that question about its time of publication, the real-life elements it borrows, and the story it creates, and it may as well be asking it of our current moment, which is arguably just as surreal and evolving as the world Candace inhabits...continued
Full Review
(1225 words)
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Many contemporary novels feature alternating dual or multiple timelines, and many make free use of flashbacks, weaving backstory into the main narrative as it progresses. Ling Ma's Severance employs both of these techniques, creating layered narratives that interact with one another and eventually intersect. This approach serves several purposes within the story, but it is also born of the story itself, which is, among other things, an exploration of the nature of memory and nonlinear time.
The novel begins with a prologue, where the reader is introduced to a small group of survivors of an apocalyptic event in a defunct United States. The first chapter takes a step back to what first-person narrator Candace Chen calls the beginning of "...
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