Ma’s.debut transforms the mundane into a landscape of tricky memory, where questions of late-stage capitalism, immigration, displacement and motherhood converge in such a sly build-up as to render the reader completely stunned.What is the difference between a real-life pandemic that originates in China and spreads globally and a fictional pandemic that originates in China and spreads globally? Ling Ma’s apocalyptic 2018 novel Severance-which might be accurately described in terms of the latter-has resurfaced due to its uncanny anticipation of our current global crisis. Candace splits her narrative into two timelines: before Shen Fever decimates the global population and after. The novel follows the story of Candace Chen, the 20-something daughter of Chinese immigrant parents whose mother has recently died of Alzheimer’s. In the world of Severance, the drone of normal life becomes a buzz too loud to ignore. Families mime the act of sitting down for dinner, chatting about their days they clear the plates and do it again. Old women laugh at the television and change the channel. Retail workers fold shirts in empty stores. Instead, they enact and re-enact the rituals of their former day-to-day lives. As their bodies fall apart, they’re not bumbling about the ruined world or trying to kill you. The fevered victims of Ling Ma’s astounding debut novel aren’t exactly zombies. But then again, the end of everything rarely plays nice.

In both the level of detail and its thematic weight, this is a monumentally unnerving novel, one that leaves no easy answers or comfortable nooks in which to take refuge. In cursing memory, it inevitably conjures memory. on a larger level, these evocations of the recent past serve another narrative function: they make the reader complicit in the very act that this novel warns against.

Severance allows for some slightly altered versions of recent events to take place.

While Shen Fever seems as plausible as any devastating epidemic in fiction, it also hits with a greater metaphorical resonance. much of Severance’s power arrives through this: the sense that something terrible and seismic might happen, and no one would even notice. It also features one of the most hauntingly plausible end-of-the-world scenarios I’ve encountered in recent fiction, one which folds in enough hints of the real to be particularly unsettling. It’s a novel that sneaks up on you from all sides: it’s an affecting portrayal of loss, a precise fictional evocation of group dynamics, and a sharp character study of its protagonist, Candace Chen.

Severance novel