Memories beget memories. Shen Fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop.
Severance is an odd little book – postapocalyptic social satire in the voice of Millennial malaise – and I had a hard time connecting to what author Ling Ma's point might have been: On one hand, we're shown how late Capitalism is failing to provide people with meaningful lives, while on the other, the protagonist embraces her role in perpetuating the system. If postapocalyptic literature traditionally reduces characters to their essence to reveal something universal about humanity, it's strange to read a book narrated by someone who is so disconnected from humanity; I couldn't quite relate to her. I may not have been enthralled by the plot, but I did appreciate many of Ma's quirky writing choices; everything feels crafted and intentional.
The year is 2011 and humanity is succumbing to Shen Fever: a fungal infection that eventually turns people into harmless zombies, doomed to repeat familiar tasks on an endless loop until their bodies give out. In alternating chapters, Candace Chen tells us about her life before the End – as a Chinese immigrant raised mostly in Utah, then as a twenty-something orphan living and working in NYC – and her life now as a member of a group of survivors heading west to “the Facility” that their group's leader knows about. There's a very intentional parallel made between Candace's life as a wage slave and the infected people she sees after the End (like the woman in the Juicy Couture with half a face, still folding and refolding shirts into perfect rectangles), and the story is full of symmetries and ironies, all satirizing Capitalism and Consumerism and the immigrant experience. For example: Candace gets a job at a publishing house as a production manager for Bibles. Her job is to pressure Chinese suppliers to lower their production costs (even at the expense of their employees' health) for the benefit of American distributors, and when Shen Fever reaches the U.S., it's likely that the fungus spores were carried over from China in shipments of goods just like those Candace arranged every day. The result might be exactly what greedy, exploitative Capitalists deserve, but Candace herself likes her job – enjoys the routine. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, refuses to be a wage slave and does just enough temp work to support himself while he writes fiction, which Candace eventually loses patience with (“Money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.”) The Occupy Wall Street protesters take over Zuccotti Park during the early days of the infection but the movement fizzles out quickly as observers find them “decadent” and the young people are lured away with offers of free health care. If Capitalism is the problem, there's really no alternative (particularly underlined by Candace's parents watching the massacre in Tienanmen Square and her father declaring at that time that they would never return to China). More irony ensues when the survivors discover what the Facility is to which they've been led.
The title of Severance comes in in two senses; through a story told by Candace's boyfriend about the office job that turned him off Capitalism:
By the end of his second year, corporate announced that policy regarding severance packages would be changed. Severance would no longer be scaled according to the number of years that employees had worked, but the company would provide a flat fee for all employees who had worked there for fewer than ten years. Within the following year, almost all of the senior staff had been laid off, given their diminished severance payouts. The editor who'd hired him was also let go.And a story about Candace and her father going for fried chicken after their citizenship test:
My father rarely spoke of the past, and perhaps it was only after having officialized his severance from China that he felt free to speak openly of his life there. I kept quiet so as not to break the spell, hoping he would say more. And he did.And in addition to these two senses of the word, “severance” perfectly describes Candace's disconnection from the people around her – she is always alone in a crowd, before and after the End. If Millennial malaise is a thing, Candace is the poster child.
As for the writing: I enjoyed Candace's mostly disaffected tone. Candace wasn't exactly an unreliable narrator, but I liked that she didn't have a perfect memory while telling the story – that felt authentic. And I liked the odd nostalgia of some passages, as when Candace remembers visiting with her Chinese cousins:
When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature, though it precedes sexual knowledge. If Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling were a sound, it would be early/mid-nineties R & B. If it were a flavor, it would be the ice-cold Pepsi we drink as we turn down the tiny alleyways where little kids defecate wildly. It is the feeling of drowning in a big hot open gutter, of crawling inside an undressed, unstanched wound that has never been cauterized.What I didn't like: Weirdly, Ma used some vocabulary incorrectly. She writes that a building was too “vacuous” to heat – and while that word can mean “empty”, I don't know how that would make it unheatable (and this is the only example I took note of, but I was similarly jarred a few times.) And please don't tell me that a person on the thirty-second floor of an office building can hear the sleigh bells on a horse at street level. Nope. And I'm kind of over young writers with MFAs writing love letters to NYC, setting their protagonists up in a pregentrified Brooklyn and naming the trains she takes to get uptown. If the book is meant to be commentary on the drone-like lives imposed on city workers, it's pretty much undermined by Candace's own take on city life:
To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless. To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?Which, again, leaves me wondering what the point of it all was.
