In the summer between ninth and tenth grade, my friend and I would frequently visit the Newmarket Public Library. We’d spend afternoons browsing the dim aisles of the fiction section, checking out books, and strolling around the nearby lake and trail that led back to our neighborhoods. I didn’t know how else to fill my time other than with books. All my other friends at the time were engrossed in playing Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto, and whenever I tried to join in, I would get a motion sickness so intense that I would be throwing up within minutes. So, physiologically, video games were ruled out for me. My book friend and I burned through Koji Suzuki’s Ring series about haunted VHS tapes and dead girls at the bottom of water tanks, science books by physicist Richard Feynman, and Steig Larsson’s crime-thriller Millenium trilogy. I’d spend afternoons reading by the side of the public outdoor pool, and when that wasn’t enough, I’d stay up until two or three in the morning reading by my nightlight. The summer of 2011 was a summer well wasted.
It’s been a long time since I’ve stayed up until the early morning hours reading. Not until this past week did I find myself doing it again, this time with Ling Ma’s 2018 debut novel Severance. Ma’s novel received a number of notable awards and accolades, winning the Kirkus prize for fiction and being a Pen/Hemingway award finalist for a debut novel. Publications such as The New Yorker, BuzzFeed, and The New York Times named Severance as one of the best books of 2018. Despite all its 2018 hoopla, however, Severance has experienced a recent resurgence in interest in 2020. Being a novel about a global pandemic that grinds the world to a halt, Severance reads like a warning from the past, a history of events that hasn’t happened yet.
Taking place in the fall of 2011, the novel follows Candace Chen, a millennial daughter of Chinese immigrants working at a Manhattan book publisher. Candace first arrives in New York impassive and untethered, “carried by the tides of others”, after the death of her mother and father. Her family originally arrived in the USA when she was six years old so her father could pursue a graduate degree in the 1980s. Having no relatives other than distant family members in Fujian province in China (whose names she doesn’t even know and whose language she can barely speak), Candace is set upon a dispassionate life trajectory whose immigrant beginnings seem to provide no foundation or guidance towards a murky and unexcitable future. Her job in publishing is not as exciting as she had anticipated – originally hoping for a position in the glamorous art books department, she works instead in the monotonous Bibles division where she coordinates the sourcing and printing of Bibles from cheap Chinese manufacturers. After a visit to a Shenzhen manufacturing plant, Candace comes to the grim realization that she is a small, inextricable part of the vast global machinery of capitalism and global trade. Candace thus resigns her days to manoeuvring office politics and ordering paper stock and pleather covers for Bibles aimed at teenage midwestern girls.
But with this background established, Severance does not proceed linearly. Its chapters alternate between various times and locations, creating a holistic and kaleidoscopic vision not only of Candace’s past immigrant upbringing and present disaffected life of office ennui, but of the pandemic that swiftly engulfs and annihilates the world around her. If anything, when the pandemic begins is when the novel gets funny and functions as satire. The pandemic begins in the background of Candace’s office chores – it is a fever transmitted through undetectable airborne fungal spores, and at first receives no more than a bit of sensationalized news coverage. The “Shen fever”, so called because the epicenter of the pandemic is the city of Shenzhen, causes its victims to revert to a mindless zombie-like state where the menial tasks of human existence are repeated over and over: an infected family of four says grace and eats dinner over empty plates; an infected cabbie drives aimlessly through the streets of New York; an infected and jawless Juicy Couture employee folds velour tracksuits for eternity.
While the world crumbles around Candace, she only digs in harder into her work: it’s the only thing she has left. Eventually Candace moves into her office building after all the other staff in her office get infected and leave, striving to preserve the one remaining kernel of normalcy and stability she has left. When Candace can’t access her office-home anymore – she forgot her keycard inside and cannot get back in – she’s finally forced to contend with surviving in an abandoned city completely hostile to the continuation of a normal life. As Candace flees a desolate city, she’s picked up by a band of survivors heading west who are led by their cultish leader Bob. Tensions in the group result in a violent crisis as they struggle to conform to Bob’s increasingly cult-like and nostalgic ideas for building a new normalcy in a broken world.
Throughout the course of Severance, it may seem like its little details are what make it such a prescient novel of the COVID-19 era. The cheeky mentions of wearing masks in public, work-from-home initiatives, and the complete inability of the global capitalist economy to deal with a worldwide pandemic will appear reminiscent and relevant to the current reader. Yet the novel suggests that underneath it all, the real danger lies in nostalgia, of complacently hoping things will return to what they were before. As some of Candace’s friends discover, the Shen fever often activates when its host engages with their nostalgia – visiting a childhood home, for instance, only serves to induce the fatal zombie-like stupor of the fungus. Likewise, a major factor of the continuing spread and resurgence of COVID-19 is the public’s desire for things to go back to business as usual, to be able to gather at restaurants and rallies and gyms without the phantom of disease hanging over us. And even when, whenever it may be, COVID-19 is no longer a threat, we must not let ourselves think that the world can continue exactly as it did. For now, we must put up with the new normal of Zoom, masks, and social distancing. But the COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to critique and dismantle the failures of neoliberal capitalism that allowed the pandemic to get as bad as it did, which Severance so savagely satirizes.
Perhaps for now I’ll let myself indulge in some nostalgia. I’ll let myself pretend I’m not a stressed-out law nerd missing out on precious sleep reading novels late at night in midterm season, but that I’m back in the simpler days of high school summer vacation nights. Nostalgia will be some small comfort for the present, but it will not suffice for the future.
