Severance by Ling Ma

I finished reading this book on the same day I’m writing this, and clearly my curiosity for weird, dystopian circumstances hasn’t faded because here I am once again with Severance by Ling Ma. Heads up, there are some spoilers.

When a spore-born virus hits New York City, Candace Chen, a millennial product coordinator at a publisher that produces Bibles, is left to fend for her own survival. Her company offers her a substantial sum to continue working through the Shen Flu outbreak, requiring her to show up each day even as the city, and its inhabitants, grow increasingly desolate. Midtown Manhattan becomes a ghost town; even the horses that once trotted through Central Park pulling buggies now graze on foliage sprouting through the cracks of trash-strewn sidewalks. Holed up in her old office building while everyone else has either succumbed to the fever or fled the city, Candace reflects on her life choices, her job, her future, her relationships, and her past. She wanders the city taking photographs, like the horse mentioned earlier, and posts them to her old photography blog. As she begins to realize that the population is steadily dwindling toward zero, Candace leaves the city and encounters a group of survivors led by a man named Bob who are heading to, what he calls it, the Facility.

I really wanted to like this book, with its interesting concepts and plot points, but its critique on capitalism fell flat for me. I didn’t even realize that it was supposed to be satirical. As I was reading, I kept wondering if I was missing the point or thinking about it too literally. I think that Ma effectively creates an allegory in which the collapse of the country, through the Shen Fever and societal breakdown, mirrors the collapse of the American Dream: the belief that hard work, routine, and loyalty to a job will lead to stability, success, and fulfillment. 

Candace keeps going to work, mind you, her parents are dead and she quite literally has no one left, so she clings to routine and productivity even when they no longer make sense or offer safety or meaning. Her job, consumer culture, and corporate loyalty persist absurdly long after they should, highlighting how deeply ingrained these ideals are. This plot point was interesting; however, it represents only one section of the book. I would argue that about 70% of the novel has little to do with a critique of capitalism, instead jumping incoherently between Candace’s life in New York, her time traveling with the group to the Facility, and her memories of her parents.

Now that my criticism is out of the way, I would like to talk about the moments that I did like. 

The scene with the taxi driver, Eddie, is my favorite part of the entire book. Eddie is a cabbie Candace meets because the MTA has stopped running and the shuttle buses set up between Brooklyn and Manhattan are unreliable, yet Candace is still expected to go to work despite the epidemic. When she calls a cab company, she meets Eddie, and the two strike up a conversation about why they’ve chosen to stay in the city. This exchange also ties directly to the novel’s engagement with the American Dream: Eddie talks about growing up in Spanish Harlem in the Bronx and explains that the Shen Fever won’t scare him into leaving his home. He reflects on how New York City was built by immigrants who came through Ellis Island. What I loved about this conversation is that, despite how brief it is, there’s a real sense of intimacy—the two of them riding through a ghost-town city in a yellow cab, feeling seen and understood by one another.

I also liked the cultish nature of Bob and his group, but I especially loved the concept of the Facility. I’m drawn to apocalyptic panic in books—the idea of traveling through abandoned places in search of refuge. Spoiler alert: the Facility turns out to be just an abandoned mall that Bob selfishly leads the group to because it fills him with nostalgia. This detail scratched an itch in my brain that enjoys watching urban exploration videos on YouTube, but I digress. Still, I enjoyed the imagery of the deserted shops the group holes up in. The same goes for Candace’s strolls down Fifth Avenue, where she mentions stores that no longer exist in the present day, like Juicy Couture and Henri Bendel. It’s fascinating, and a little unsettling, because I’d almost forgotten those places ever existed. 

Overall, I don’t think this book is worth the hype. The multiple plotlines weren’t woven together as fluidly as I would have liked, and the critique of capitalism wasn’t strong enough to fully resonate with me. That said, the writing itself is solid, and Ma’s descriptions of emotions, places, and objects are both poetic and witty. Oh, and the ending was not satisfying at all. It felt as though Ma didn’t quite know how to conclude Candace’s journey, which resulted in a clichéd and underwhelming ending.