Witness a Millennial Apocalypse in Ling Ma’s Severance
There are many ways to write the apocalypse, and what lies beyond it. “Last night” stories detail incidences of violence and disease that change the world irrevocably: the lingering illness, the rattling death of the civic systems, the first reanimations and the inevitable attack. Road trip stories find characters wending their way through an empty, haunted landscape, stopping uncomfortably in the abandoned small town or suburb, lulled by the unspooling scenery and disquieted by the unending quiet. Then there’s the elegy: the long, slow recitation of the events that led to the end of all things—the End, and then the Beginning—as the survivors struggle to pick up and carry on.
Severance
Hardcover $26.00
Severance
By Ling Ma
Hardcover $26.00
Severance, the debut novel by Ling Ma, manages to bind all of these various storytelling styles into an artfully drawn satire, the kind with humor so dry you almost wonder if its there. Well, it’s there, and so sharp you don’t feel the cut at first.
Severance, the debut novel by Ling Ma, manages to bind all of these various storytelling styles into an artfully drawn satire, the kind with humor so dry you almost wonder if its there. Well, it’s there, and so sharp you don’t feel the cut at first.
The novel follows Candace Chen in overlapping vignettes through her life: from Fuzhou to Salt Lake City as the child of Chinese immigrants; from post-college ennui, documenting the streets of New York for a blog called NY Ghost, to an entry level job at a company that facilitates the publication of specialty bibles; from a slowly, inevitably emptying post-plague Manhattan, to her own uncomfortable exodus with a group of survivors.
Candace is a dry narrator, with the flat affect of the severely traumatized or the satirical creature, but she slowly warms to conviction and personality as the story unwinds. She records New York, where she has made her home after college and the death of her parents, with the eye of the photographer: always framing the moments, detached, offering vignettes instead of biography.
We first meet her in the days after her rescue by a band of survivors heading West—like all good American stories do—to the promised land of the Facility.
The leader of the group, Bob, who in the pre-apocalypse was an IT guy of some sort, is something like a middle manager and a cult leader twisted together into the most terrifyingly banal aspects of both. “How do you like it here so far, being with us, I mean? Do you think we’re the right fit for you?” he asks, not long into their journey to the Chicago suburbs, using the slippery language of corporate America in the most dire of situations, as thousands, tens of thousands, millions, lie dead and dying behind closed doors. Candace demurs, like she always does.
Severance’s creeping malady is Shen fever, a fungal infection understood to originate in southern China (in fact, the same region where Candace’s company prints its specialty bibles) that causes cold-like symptoms, confusion, and ultimately compulsory action, its sufferers miming the same action again, and again, and again: a suburban mother sets the table, and clears it, over and over; one young woman tries on and discards all the dresses in her closet; another brays with laughter as she changes channels on her widescreen, the television rife with nothing funny. The actions of those with Shen fever display a decided lack of contrast with the novel’s office drones and compulsory capitalists. At one point, Candace must mollify a client who is unhappy an order gemstone-laden bibles has been delayed due to the brutal conditions that produce the gemstones. Well, yes, workers are dying, but how do I get what I want now.
Zone One
Paperback $16.00
Zone One
In Stock Online
Paperback $16.00
In this, the novel reminds me of Zone One, Colson Whitehead’s masterful zombie novel-slash-elegy for post-9/11 New York. Severance isn’t quite a zombie novel—its characters argue taxonomy at one point, in regards to whether the fevered tick enough boxes to be considered the shambling undead—but it has some commonalities with narratives of the zombie apocalypse. In Zone One, in addition to the usual slow, shuffling zombies, there are also “stragglers”—the formerly living, frozen into a specific action: flying a kite, standing over a copier—who are not dissimilar from those afflicted with Shen fever. Both Whitehead’s stragglers and Ling Ma’s fevered fall back to the repetitive actions that constitute a life, and then an undeath, in these Americas. Wake up, go to work, come home, repeat, and repeat, and repeat.
In this, the novel reminds me of Zone One, Colson Whitehead’s masterful zombie novel-slash-elegy for post-9/11 New York. Severance isn’t quite a zombie novel—its characters argue taxonomy at one point, in regards to whether the fevered tick enough boxes to be considered the shambling undead—but it has some commonalities with narratives of the zombie apocalypse. In Zone One, in addition to the usual slow, shuffling zombies, there are also “stragglers”—the formerly living, frozen into a specific action: flying a kite, standing over a copier—who are not dissimilar from those afflicted with Shen fever. Both Whitehead’s stragglers and Ling Ma’s fevered fall back to the repetitive actions that constitute a life, and then an undeath, in these Americas. Wake up, go to work, come home, repeat, and repeat, and repeat.
The survivors go on “stalks,” ritualistically stripping abandoned homes of useful items. There are live stalks, and the dead, and the difference is stark. (That post-apocalyptic fiction creates its own neologisms is a notable oddity.) The survivor group Candace falls in with has developed a proscribed manner for dealing with the dead and dying, and Candace trudges along with everyone else (all nine or ten of everyone alive in the New York area anyway). Not unlike how she fell into her relationship with her boyfriend, into her job at the publisher, into everything she’s ever done. It’s only at the very end that she starts going out, documenting her dying city for strangers in cold, faraway places that haven’t been ravaged by the fever, for people on an internet that will eventually blink out, like everything else.
The elegy of place—of New York—and the lapping blood tide of personal reverie and the uselessness of memory shape the novel as something warmer than irony and less combative than parody. It is situated somewhere in the near past (roughly 2011), in a time ripe for essays on the symbology of luxury consumer goods, while acknowledging that the past is repeatedly, inevitably dead; repeated forever and ever unto death. The office drone, the factory worker, the hipster upstart, the refusenik, the Wall Street occupier, the cool girls and their enviers, the capitalist; they all meet their end in here, cut off from what makes them people and consigned to the compulsory undeath of late-stage capitalism, or whatever, you know.
The term “millennial” refers to the beleaguered generation defined by both Harry Potter and Columbine. But the term has another connotation: the millennium is the biblical period before and culminating in the end times. Millennials are the people of the end of it all. Candace Chen is all of this, facilitating the production of specialty bibles as the world stutters to its rote conclusion. Nothing about her world comes as a surprise to Candace, one way or another; she’s the inheritor of traumas cultural, familial, and personal. But she’s also a survivor, both literally and figuratively, and the kind of person who can appreciate the difference.