Severance by Ling Ma
Severance, no relation to the television show of the same name, won lots of awards. It ended up on various NYT Books of the Year type lists, and so it ended up on the stacks here at Bold Point.
Severance, published in 2017, tells the story of Candice Chen, first generation Chinese-American as she navigates through her first real job, a few relationships, and the end of civilization at the hands of an infectious disease that originates in Shenzhen, China and wipes out most of humanity. The plague is a fungal infection (shades of The Last of Us) and it turns people into harmless zombies who just fall into the routine of doing their jobs while they rot away. When her (shitty) boyfriend leaves the city in order to try to find a more meaningful life as a writer, and encourages our protagonist to return to her photograpy, Candice lets him go and keeps working at her job, coordinating the manufacture of bibles in a factory in Shenzhen from her perch in NYC. As the world falls apart around her, she reflects on consumerism, brunches, $6 lattes, her troubled relationship with her mom, and the lengths that twenty-somethings in New York will go to to find some sense of meaning in life.
After humanity ends, Candice falls in with a group of former office drones who take over a mall in the sorrowful Midwest and live there while she prepares to give birth to a baby.
The novel works as none-to-subtle black humor on late stage capitalism. There are some interesting looks at modern NYC relationships, and the difficulties of generational-trauma on Millineal immigrant kids like Candice. And, of course, a "China Flu" that ends up wiping out civilization, written before 2017, before Covid, before... everything... feels vaguely prophetic.
If I were to criticize Severance, and Mrs. Ma's novel, it would be only to say that the novel seems to offer no conclusions. Did Candice manage to escape her meaningless life in NYC as she dissapears into the abandoned Casbah of post-apocalpyse Chicago? Will her baby be born and spared the harsh tiger-mom criticism that seems to shape the lives of so many first generation Chinese women? (Better addressed in the magnificent Everything Everywhere All At Once.) In a world where mass affuence is coercising young people into doing meaningless jobs they hate - turning them into virtual zombies - in order to constantly buy things they don't really want... is the not-particularly-likeable boyfriend (with a dick like a "repulsive sea-cucumber") the one with the right answer: Turn on, tune in, drop out?
Ma raises interesting questions, with a fun tounge-in-cheek narrative of office life and the post-apocalupse, but she doesn't really give us any satisfying conclusions to think about. Perhaps there are none.
