Book Review: "Severance" by Ling Ma

Severance (2018)
Ling Ma (1983)
291 pages

An illness originating in China with initial symptoms similar to the common cold spreads to become a global pandemic; workplaces provide masks and bring in disinfection services before eventually shifting their employees to work at home; groups of protestors not wearing masks enrage the public; cities empty out as their populations flee in fear: author Ling Ma’s novel Severance has all the hallmarks of a Covid-era tale.

Then you check, and discover it was published in 2018…

Ma’s fictional pandemic does differ in its transmission path and, critically, in having significantly more devastating consequences. As the story opens, our narrator, Candace Chen, has left a nearly deserted New York City behind, and met up with a small group of survivors who are headed for a site on the outskirts of Chicago, where the group’s unofficial leader has a large mall that he owns, and that he proposes they make into their home base.

The novel tells Chen’s story by weaving together three separate timelines: one tracks her experiences with the group as they head west toward their destination; a second provides flashbacks to the days pre- and post-pandemic in which she struggles to make a life for herself in New York; and a third, recollections of her childhood with her parents, who both passed away some years earlier. Rather than telling a sequential story, the flashbacks skip around – the way we often recall a memory of a particular moment or period in our lives, triggered for reasons that may remain inscrutable.

Her parents’ death during college left Chen floundering – isolated by both distance and cultural experience from the rest of her extended family still in China. After graduating, she followed her friends to the city, but, with no immediate employment prospects, she lives off funds inherited from her parents, while watching her friends transition ahead of her into the expectations of adulthood, with jobs and relationships. Finally, after what seems to her a disconcertingly long wait, she too finds work and a boyfriend, and settles into the life she feels is expected of her.

Then, in the immediate run-up to the pandemic, she separates from her boyfriend. Soon after, the pandemic spreads, and with no connections and nowhere to go, she agrees to remain working on-site for her company in downtown New York, becoming one of a small cadre asked to keep an eye on things in-person. As she watches the city, and civilization more generally, grind to a halt, inertia keeps her doing the job she has promised to do, the routine blinding her to the increasing futility of the work. Eventually reality breaks through, however, and she flees the eerily vacant city, eventually meeting the group she comes to travel with.

It is interesting to consider how differently this novel will tend to be read in the wake of readers’ experience with the Covid pandemic, relative to someone who read it in the before-times. I can imagine that, if I had read it then, I would have found it a story that used the plot device of a pandemic apocalypse as a means to explore idiosyncrasies of human behavior; in particular, the challenges for first generation immigrant families, and also the many unspoken expectations and numbing ruts of working life. This was, for example, how I read Emily St. John Mandel’s brilliant Station Eleven, and Edan Lepucki’s California – the particulars of the apocalypse in each case were not the point; the depth of these story lay in the human experience the pandemic revealed. (My reviews of these other novels linked to at right.)

But, we can’t go back and, reading Ma’s novel today, in the immediate aftermath of the depths of the Covid pandemic, I found it difficult not to focus on and identify with Chen’s experience of the evolution of the pandemic, from the earliest days of it being a rumor of a disease in a faraway place, through the stages of denial, the vane belief that it couldn’t be that bad, to the realization of the deadly reality. However striking and moving I found Ma’s descriptions of the struggles of Chen’s parents as they tried to make a new life in the United States, or of Chen’s own feelings of disaffectedness as she tries to find her way growing up, or maturing into an adult with an apartment and a job, or even surviving in the post-pandemic world – a world many orders of magnitude worse than what happened with Covid – it was the portions of the story that traced the gradual, never quite accepted descent into the pandemic that held my attention most powerfully. They simply felt too close to reality.

And, as New York City shut down around Chen, gradually but inexorably, I had a bit of a post-traumatic stress reaction, a mental shift back to the early period of the Covid pandemic, when store shelves were suddenly not so well stocked, and the realization dawned that it wasn’t something that was going to go away in a few weeks.

Clearly civilization has survived Covid. But there remains now this period, if hopefully transitory, when what we experienced leaves some residual fear that it could have been so much worse – and that the next one could be so much worse. And that lingering uncertainty and disquiet will tend to color a present-day reading of Ma’s novel, diverting attention away from her trenchant exploration of the immigrant experience as well as of the working world experienced by so many who work as part of fitting in to the social expectations, not because they have necessarily discovered their passion.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
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