“AFTER THE END came the Beginning.” This is how we enter the world of Ling Ma’s debut novel Severance: in the liminal space between end and possibility. In a narrative that alternates between aftermath and memory, we find a stark reflection of our present.
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Protaganist Candace Chen works for a book production company, and her specialty is the acquisition of Bibles. Tedious office work. She has lost her parents, recently left a relationship, and lives alone in Manhattan when news of a spreading illness—Shen Fever—erupts. The fever begins in China, in a region that produces the Gemstone Bible, one of Candace’s specialty Bibles. Before and during this outbreak, work, for Candace, is at once sustenance and distraction.
Who can live outside capitalism? Jonathan, Candace’s ex, certainly tries. But that is not the life Candace wants—or, rather, that is not the life her immigrant parents raised her to want. Her decision to stay in New York, even as her staff thins and the city’s streets empty on account of the fever, reveals the complexities of consumerist culture, particularly the way the culture makes it so that the people most vulnerable to it become most reliant on it.
Consider Candace’s parents. When Ruifang Yang and her husband, Zhigang Chen, arrive in the United States, Zhigang sinks into the work of his PhD. But Ruifang has nothing and feels trapped. Afraid of losing his wife, Zhigang decides they will do “things they didn’t normally do, American things.” They find what solace they can in the American consumerist culture. Later, the couple—who are not religious—seek out the familiar at a Chinese Christian community church. Candace reflects upon the comfort her mother found in the routine of prayer: “She practically invented her own life in America by praying.”
As much as Severance is about family and memory, it is also about cities, New York City most of all: Cities as mythology, as places of growth, failure, and false promises. “The city was posited as the ultimate consolation,” Candace tells us.
This is not unlike how Bob, the leader of the group Candace joins in the post-apocalyptic sprawl, dangles the promise of the “Facility”—a location said to be safe from the fever—to control his followers. The novel echoes our frightening reality: a world where the powerful constantly craft narratives to further dehumanize the vulnerable.
At once critical and poignant, Severance captures the condition of “moving forward” in a capitalistic, consumerist world that does not allow rest. In our exhaustion, we return to the reliable, to faith and memories of family, where we seek comfort when the world plunges into chaos. In Severance, Ling Ma has written a powerful story, one of the more necessary reads of our time.
Elinam Agbo earned an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program. Born in Ghana, she grew up in the U.S. Midwest.
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