Contemporary Authors

• Severance - 2018 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York City

• Ling Ma - http://lingma.tumblr.com/bio

  Bio
  I’m a writer of mostly fiction and some nonfiction. My debut novel Severance is forthcoming from FSG in August 2018.

  My fiction has been published in (or is forthcoming from) Granta, Vice, Playboy, Ninth Letter, and ACM, among others. A short story, “Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling,” won the Texas Observer Short Story Contest. A novel excerpt received the 2015 Graywolf SLS Prize, awarded by Graywolf Press.

  I was born in Sanming, China, and grew up in Utah, Nebraska, and Kansas. I hold an MFA from Cornell University, where I also taught. Currently, I serve as an assistant professor at my alma mater, University of Chicago.

• The Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/22/apocalyptic-office-novel-an-interview-with-ling-ma/

  Apocalyptic Office Novel: An Interview with Ling Ma
  By Madeline Day August 22, 2018 AT WORK

  Ling Ma’s debut novel, Severance, transcends any typical classification. It is part satirical office drama, part immigrant narrative, part millennial bildungsroman—with a dash of zombie apocalypse. Severance chronicles the life of Candace Chen, an obedient worker bee who is one of the last people alive in New York City after the Shen Fever strikes. The “fevered” who populate the city aren’t your classic teeth-gnashing, skin-peeling zombies. Instead, victims of the Fever are reduced to creatures of habit—they adhere mindlessly to their everyday grinds until they quite literally work themselves to death.

  Before the Fever, Candace works for a Bible production company in New York that outsources its labor to Southeast Asia. When the city starts to crumble and all of her coworkers flee, Candace chooses to stay behind and work—in part because her only family is far away in China and in part because she finds comfort in the familiarity of her day-to-day routine. Alone in New York, Candace spends her days wandering through the city and taking photos to post on her blog under the pseudonym NY Ghost. She catalogues abandoned avenues and ransacked luxury stores in hopes that people elsewhere will respond with their own nostalgic or romanticized versions of the city. (“If New York is breaking down and no one documents it, is it actually happening?”) Eventually, when the MTA shuts down and the bodegas close one by one, Candace and a small group of survivors are forced to make their way to a safe “Facility” located near Chicago. All the while, through a series of flashbacks, Candace draws parallels between her own journey and that of her parents, who left their home in China for a new life in the States.

  In the end, Severance isn’t so much a story about zombies as it is an imaginative critique of capitalism. Underneath Ma’s deadpan comedy lie shrewd observations of the West and the decadence of our everyday existence. We indulge in Frappuccinos and overpriced packaged vegetables at Whole Foods. We live off of products made by labor outsourced to China and Indonesia and Pakistan. In Ma’s eyes, the Fever is an inevitable symptom of Americans’ rapacious consumption. “What you do every day matters,” Candace insists at one point. If we don’t listen, we might just get what we deserve.

  Although Severance is Ma’s first novel, she has published short stories in Granta, Playboy, Chicago Reader, and elsewhere. She received her M.F.A. at Cornell University and is currently an assistant professor in the creative writing department at the University of Chicago. I had the chance to correspond with Ma the week leading up to the release of Severance, and we discussed her influences, the experiences that fueled her novel, and her opinions on social media.

  INTERVIEWER

  Can you speak a little bit about the inspiration behind Severance? How long did this project take you?

  MA

  Severance began in 2012 as an apocalyptic short story. I worked on it at my desk in the last months of my office job. The company was downsizing, and many employees were getting laid off. As the story progressed, its moods were both joyful and angry. I began to understand that the anger was rooted in issues of work and that in effect, I was unwittingly writing an apocalyptic office novel. I finished the first draft in 2016.

  INTERVIEWER

  Like the Chen family in Severance, your own family moved to the U.S. from China when you were little. There’s an increasing amount of literature about the immigrant experience—the Chinese American immigrant experience in particular—and yet yours is the first I’ve read that is set in a postapocalyptic world. Can you tell me more about that decision?

  MA

  While it may seem like I had some master plan in combining all these genres, the process was more experimental. The question I kept trying to figure out was, Why does Candace Chen keep working at her job? Understanding her family background and this immigrant imperative for success helped me complete the picture. Candace’s immigrant backstory was the most difficult, yet vital, part of the story to write.

  INTERVIEWER

  The original title of Severance was Chinese Bibles. What made you switch?

  MA

  I woke up one morning, and it came to me. Severance. It never happens like that, but I thought it was a perfect title. It alludes to many storylines throughout the novel. Chinese Bibles, while catchy, is somewhat inaccurate. It suggests Mao’s Little Red Book, not Bibles manufactured in China.

  INTERVIEWER

  Candace is often nostalgic for the eighties. She wears her mother’s vintage clothes, watches old rom-coms, and even throws an “eighties decadence”–themed party. What was it that interested you, as a writer, about that decade?

  MA

  The eighties were more or less the time that China-U.S. relations began to open up. Many visiting Chinese scholars came to America and vice versa. It was also the era when China became more free market–friendly, introducing special economic zones in its regions with special tax breaks and other enticements to attract foreign business. Shenzhen, which is where Candace visits one of the Bible printers, is located in one of these zones. I also think about Reaganomics, the booming economy, the sense of wealth and excess. It’s a very “cool” decade, but I like that the line between good and bad taste was precariously thin. As far as the eighties in New York, I would also point to that special issue of T about the cultural impact of 1981 to 1983. It’s one of the most thrilling things I’ve read in a print magazine.

  On a personal note, maybe because I was too young to have really lived the eighties, it feels like a lost era to me. I do remember that when I lived in China, I rode on my grandmother’s bicycle, and the streets were flooded with bicycles. There were very few cars. I also remember riding in a car for the first time, what a strange sensation that was. These days, of course, the streets are glutted with cars.

  INTERVIEWER

  In addition to your family’s past and your own office-job experience, what or who were your biggest influences during your writing process?

  MA

  I took notes from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, which is about an English butler in the twilight of his career who questions whether he threw his life away for his job. Well, he doesn’t directly question it, but by the way he keeps fixating on it, constantly justifying his career, we as readers come to that conclusion. In Severance, we begin with a slightly different premise. Candace Chen already knows that her job isn’t really doing anything meaningful in the world. Yet she keeps going with it.

  In terms of zombie-related stuff, I watched a lot of The Walking Dead, though I never made it past the third or fourth season. The Romero films, of course. In the beginning, I thought of Severance as Terrence Malick meets Romero, an unholy mash-up that probably defies good taste. As I was working on the novel, I read the first five volumes of Knausgaard’s My Struggle and also Emil Ferris’s graphic novel, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Both brought me a great deal of comfort during the writing process, and I’m sure they both made it into Severance in some way.

  INTERVIEWER

  Severance is composed of chapters that alternate between Candace’s narrative present and her flashbacks to the past. The two storylines don’t fully connect until the very end of the novel. Can you tell us how you reached this structure?

  MA

  Just as my influences are pretty eclectic, my arrival at Severance’s narrative structure was a bit haphazard too. The mode of attack was writing whatever scene I was most excited by, whatever felt most urgent at the time, and then piecing those scenes together. I never felt like I was forcing any connections. I trusted that by sheer enthusiasm and a dash of not knowing any better, this Frankenstein’s monster would come alive at the eleventh hour.

  INTERVIEWER

  You briefly touch on the pervasive nature of social media in Severance, especially when Candace muses on the Internet as a form of “collective memory.” I’m curious about your own relationship with the Internet. Many publishing houses put pressure on new authors to engage in promotion of their own work through social media, yet you don’t seem to have much of an online presence. Can you speak about that choice?

  MA

  Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget, which is about our age of digital collectivism, should be required reading before anyone signs up for a Facebook or Spotify account. That and I’m just a private person. I’m not not on social media—I’m just there in limited and circumscribed ways. I’d prefer my fiction exist in the world for me, in place of any public face. Absolved of the imperative to present a persona, I can just be a classy-looking footstool or something.

  Madeline Day is an intern at The Paris Review.

• Los Angeles Times - http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-ling-ma-20180824-story.html

  'Office politics is, to some degree, horrifying' - Ling Ma on her horror-satire 'Severance'
  By MICHAEL SCHAUB
  AUG 24, 2018 | 9:00 AM

  'Office politics is, to some degree, horrifying' - Ling Ma on her horror-satire 'Severance'
  Author Ling Ma. Her debut is the novel 'Severance.' (Anjali Pinto)

  After Ling Ma got laid off from her office job, she decided to get her revenge by killing almost everyone in the world — in her debut novel, that is. “Severance” follows Candace Chen, one of nine people to survive the outbreak of Shen Fever, a disease that started in China and found its way to the United States.

  The disease is an insidious one. It kills some people and turns others into, effectively, zombies — infected and sick, they go through the motions of their everyday routines. Candace and the other survivors, led by a megalomaniac computer programmer named Bob, raid the houses of the dead and infected for supplies, killing the zombies they find.

  Published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, “Severance” goes back and forth in time, before and after the epidemic. In her old life, Candace, a millennial who moved to the U.S. from China as a young girl, worked a boring office job at a New York publisher and dated an aspiring writer named Jonathan. In her new life, she and the rest of the plague’s survivors try to make their way to Chicago, where Bob has promised there’s a fortress they can live in.

  Ma spoke to The Times via telephone from her home in Chicago.

  “Severance” is part post-apocalyptic horror, part office satire. How did you decide to combine those two themes?
  I had started working at an office, and office politics is, to some degree, horrifying. [Laughs] For a good part of my life, it was the main horror of my life. The company I worked for was downsizing, and I started writing this book in the last few months of getting laid off. I had only been there for three years; other employees had been there for 30-plus years. So I started writing kind of a fun, apocalyptic short story. I wanted to be destructive in some ways, and fiction can realize a lot of fantasies. I was kind of angry, but I also felt extremely liberated and extremely gleeful at the same time; it was a strange combination of glee and anger at once. That's kind of the origin of “Severance” — it took me a while to realize that it was actually a novel. After I was laid off from my job, I did an MFA program, and spent four years working on it.

  Were you influenced by any horror novels or movies dealing with zombies?
  For reference, I definitely watched some of the George Romero films. I was also watching “The Walking Dead” at the time. I haven't gotten through the whole series; I think I only watched maybe the first two or three seasons. I've always been a huge fan of horror, but I've never been a huge fan of zombie horror, so it's strange this is what came out. I love ghost stories, because I feel like they're essentially psychological stories that you're trying to unpack. But zombies just seem so dumb and bludgeoning, in some ways. But I was watching a lot of “Walking Dead,” and I was also watching a lot of “Mad Men,” and I think somewhere between “Walking Dead” and “Mad Men,” there was some sort of mash-up. My novel is an approximation between those two TV shows in some way. [Laughs] To be honest, I learned how to plot a novel by watching eight years of “Mad Men.” I just loved how they take certain themes and keep developing them through the seasons, and then cash out on them. There are other shows that I think of as about work shows, like “The Sopranos” and “The X-Files”; those were also big influences.

  It's funny, you don't hear people talk about “The Sopranos” and “The X-Files” as office shows, but they really are, in a way.
  Yeah. I mean, “The Sopranos” is just office politics, but with the stakes heightened so much more. It was strange, because I'd work my little office job, and I would totally relate to Tony Soprano. [Laughs]

  "Severance" by Ling Ma
  "Severance" by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

  In horror movies, zombies are usually the bad guys. But in “Severance,” the opposite is true. How did you come up with the idea of having the humans be the villains, and the zombies be the victims?
  I didn't consciously set out to do that, but I never felt like the zombies were a huge threat in any way. In the novel, the zombies have contracted Shen Fever, and one of the inspirations for Shen Fever was thinking about the nature of factory work, like when Candace goes to Shenzhen and sees [workers] doing assembly-line labor, those repetitive motions, routines that are so bludgeoning. In a way, Shen Fever, which is named after Shenzhen, inflicts that on the rest of the world, and you see that inflicted on New York. And I suppose I wanted the zombies in some way to make more literal what we were going through. [Laughs] So often I worked a job when I have thought to myself, "Add 50 years to this, and I'll be dead." Essentially, Shen Fever expedites that process, right? I felt like maybe the zombie narrative was just something to parallel what Candace and other people go through.

  Candace's job involves outsourcing the production of Bibles. Why Bibles?
  I thought Bibles were a great entry point to discuss or play around with ideas of consumerism, simply because everyone owns a Bible and yet it's still the bestselling book of every year. The trick of selling Bibles is, essentially, how do you make consumers buy something they already own? What you do is you repackage it with a different spin. And it's also a high-labor product, so it has to be made in a place like China or somewhere else with low wages. I thought it was a great way to talk about consumerism and also talk about global capitalism. I wanted to show what global capitalism feels and looks like on the individual scale, and from the point of view of someone who's not particularly powerful, but who has the perception to see and understand these systems, but also feels powerless to change it or do much of anything about it.

  The novel is a satire of capitalism from the point of view of the millennial protagonist, Candace. Do you think that millennials are more critical of capitalism than prior generations have been?
  Many of my friends, especially throughout their 20s, lived without health insurance, just to try to be a writer or an artist. There is this feeling of working to live. Technically, I am a millennial, but if I were [a few years older] I'd be Gen-X. I didn't grow up with the internet until I was maybe 15 and I only got a smartphone a few years ago. But there is, among my friends at least, complete disillusionment with the capitalist system. At the same time, what I will say is that I'm a complete consumer myself. I shop at H&M. [Laughs]

  I'm not a millennial but I feel like it must be frustrating to be in these dire economic straits, through no fault of their own, and then see all these clickbait articles with headlines like "Millennials are killing mayonnaise" and that kind of thing.
  Most of my friends are in their 30s now, and they're still trying to pay down their student loans. It's just frustrating, full stop. And maybe a lot of their concerns kind of condense into Candace Chen.

  Candace has to deal with office politics before the apocalypse at her job at the publisher, but also after the apocalypse. She has to deal with Bob, who's this kind of mansplaining Svengali. Do you think that these power structures that exist are so strong that they'll still be around even after the apocalypse?
  Yeah. Seemingly with apocalyptic narratives, it's the illusion of the sudden blank slate. The whole slate is wiped clean, you can begin anew, and get it right this time. But what happens in “Severance” is that the old power structures in some way replicate themselves. I see Bob as someone who probably at his old job felt that he didn't have a lot of power, and when this opportunity comes along, he really makes a grab for it. I think this book does tend to be more pessimistic about that. It's human nature in some ways. You still have to work, and someone else is going to make you work.

  Schaub is a writer in Texas.

• Chicago Review of Books - https://chireviewofbooks.com/2018/08/14/severance-ling-ma-interview/

  INTERVIEWS
  In ‘Severance,’ Ling Ma Destroys New York City
  A conversation with the Chicago author of a sudden apocalypse.

  BY ADAM MORGAN
  AUGUST 14, 2018
  COMMENT 1
  In Ling Ma’s debut novel, Severance, a deadly fungal infection called Shen Fever hits Manhattan. When her coworkers start falling ill, Candace Chen — a Bible production specialist — signs an obscenely generous contract to keep working until the crisis is over. But as the crisis turns into an apocalypse, and New York turns into a ghost city, Candace keeps showing up at the office every morning — until she joins a group of survivors on a pilgrimage to Chicago.

  It’s a stunning book. I devoured Severance in as close to a single sitting as possible with a two-year-old daughter, and it shook me on an emotional level that no other apocalyptic novel has reached. I recently spoke with Ling Ma, who teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago, about the end of the world, capitalism, New York and Chicago, and how she wrote Severance.

  lm2

  Adam Morgan

  When and where did you start writing this book?

  Ling Ma

  I started writing this book back in 2012, when I lived in Chicago. The company I worked at was downsizing and closing the office I worked at, thus letting many of its employees go, including me. In those last few months on the job, I had this idea for an apocalyptic short story, which, the more I worked on it, the more I had to say. After the job ended, I took my severance and unemployment funds to work on the manuscript. It was a liberating but uncertain time. Definitely a dash of desperation in there too. The more I worked on the story, the more it became clear it was actually a novel, though I resisted that idea for a while.

  Eventually, in order to secure more funding, I applied to and got into an MFA program, so I moved to Ithaca, New York. I finished the first draft of Severance in 2016, which is when it sold. Then my editor and I spent some months on revisions. Her honesty was supremely helpful and clarifying.

  Adam Morgan

  Were Candace’s experiences in NYC inspired by your own?

  Ling Ma

  Candace has lived in New York far longer than I have, so she knows the city much better than I do. I wouldn’t go as far to say that Candace Chen is a New Yorker, but she could probably navigate it better than I could. I was too impatient to live in New York, too impatient for the slow trains, the long lines at grocery stores, trying to work my way through crowds clustered at tourist spots. I’ve always loved those stories in which characters occupy public places covertly, such as From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler, in which the child protagonist and her brother camp out overnight at the Met Museum. Or in The Royal Tenenbaums, when Margot and Richie sleep over in the Museum of Natural History.

  Perhaps I was thinking of those stories because Candace ultimately gets to have the entire city to herself! Some of my favorite spots, such as Walter de Maria’s Earth Room, make cameos in the novel. Even though New York, particularly Manhattan, has become a lame gentrified playground, there are still pockets of magic — all the more magical because their existence defies logic.

  Adam Morgan

  What drew you to Bible publishing, specifically?

  Ling Ma

  I think Bible manufacture is an interesting point of entry to tackle consumerism. Essentially, the trick is selling the same content with different packaging. In the book, it’s referred to as “the ultimate exercise in product packaging.” Also, it’s such a deep irony that the manufacture of Bibles, this emblem of Christianity, depends on low-wage labor in foreign countries. It’s an interesting way to think about Christianity in the era of global capitalism.

  I also thought about Christianity as a Westernizing force, and the churches in Chinese American communities. The Protestant work ethic and how that aligns so acutely with the immigrant imperative to succeed.

  Adam Morgan

  Candace’s boyfriend’s disillusionment with New York reminded me of a recent essay about how capitalism turned NYC into an empty shell for the super-rich. Did you go through a similar disillusionment while living there?

  Ling Ma

  Yes, to some extent. Although I enjoy visiting New York, I can’t see it as a place I can make a permanent home for myself, in part due to its prohibitive rents. It’s a very different city now than what it used to be. Maybe I can be accused of nostalgia in saying that. If I do suffer from nostalgia, it’s for an era of New York that I’ve never lived in or experienced.

  Adam Morgan

  Of all the apocalyptic triggers at your disposal, why Shen Fever?

  Ling Ma

  I think Shen Fever means more than one thing. There were a few points of inspiration, but here’s two that were on my mind:

  Many diseases are named after their place of origin, or a landmark from the place of origin. Shen Fever is named after the city of Shenzhen, China. While it’s a lovely, cosmopolitan city, it is also a major manufacturing hub in China — not the only one, but the one that Candace visits on her business trips in Severance. I thought about the rote, mechanical, repetitive work of factory workers on the assembly line. Perhaps Shen Fever inflicts that kind of monotony on the world.

  Secondly, I thought about our own routines, waking up and going to work. I have worked jobs where I thought, “In another 50 years, I’ll still be working here. And then I’ll be dead.” I thought of Shen Fever as something that just sped up this process, essentially. Wow, that sounded a lot more depressing than I thought!

  Adam Morgan

  Chicago serves as a sort of promised land for Candace and some of the other survivors. Why here?

  Ling Ma

  While there are a few logistical reasons why, I’d like to address this question personally as a Chicagoan, if that’s okay. Since I wrote most of this novel in Ithaca, NY, I was feeling pretty homesick and plotting my own escape back to Chicago. Perhaps it was on my mind as I finished up the novel. To those who think that you can never go home again, I have moved back to Chicago at least three times. Definitely glad to be back again!

  9780374261597_52aef

  FICTION
  Severance by Ling Ma
  Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  Published August 14, 2018

  Ling Ma received her MFA from Cornell University. Prior to graduate school she worked as a journalist and editor. Her writing has appeared in Granta, Vice, Playboy, Chicago Reader, Ninth Letter and elsewhere. A chapter of Severance received the 2015 Graywolf SLS Prize. She lives in Chicago.

9/29/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Ma, Ling: SEVERANCE
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Ma, Ling SEVERANCE Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $26.00 8, 14 ISBN: 978-0-374-26159-7
A post-apocalyptic--and pre-apocalyptic--debut.
It's 2011, if not quite the 2011 you remember. Candace Chen is a millennial living in Manhattan. She doesn't
love her job as a production assistant--she helps publishers make specialty Bibles--but it's a steady
paycheck. Her boyfriend wants to leave the city and his own mindless job. She doesn't go with him, so she's
in the city when Shen Fever strikes. Victims don't die immediately. Instead, they slide into a mechanical
existence in which they repeat the same mundane actions over and over. These zombies aren't out hunting
humans; instead, they perform a single habit from life until their bodies fall apart. Retail workers fold and
refold T-shirts. Women set the table for dinner over and over again. A handful of people seem to be
immune, though, and Candace joins a group of survivors. The connection between existence before the End
and during the time that comes after is not hard to see. The fevered aren't all that different from the factory
workers who produce Bibles for Candace's company. Indeed, one of the projects she works on almost falls
apart because it proves hard to source cheap semiprecious stones; Candace is only able to complete the
contract because she finds a Chinese company that doesn't mind too much if its workers die from lung
disease. This a biting indictment of late-stage capitalism and a chilling vision of what comes after, but that
doesn't mean it's a Marxist screed or a dry Hobbesian thought experiment. This is Ma's first novel, but her
fiction has appeared in distinguished journals, and she won a prize for a chapter of this book. She knows her
craft, and it shows. Candace is great, a wonderful mix of vulnerability, wry humor, and steely strength. She's
sufficiently self-aware to see the parallels between her life before the End and the pathology of Shen Fever.
Ma also offers lovely meditations on memory and the immigrant experience.
Smart, funny, humane, and superbly well-written.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Ma, Ling: SEVERANCE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540723395/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1b83d343.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A540723395
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Severance
Publishers Weekly.
265.23 (June 4, 2018): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Severance
Ling Ma. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (304p) ISBN 978-0-374-26159-7
In this shrewd postapocalyptic debut, Ma imagines the end times in the world of late capitalism, marked by
comforting, debilitating effects of nostalgia on its characters. The world has succumbed to Shen Fever, a
"disease of remembering" that renders its victims zombie-like, doomed to "{mimic} old routines and
gestures they must have inhabited for years." The affected aren't dangerous, just disturbingly similar to the
living in their slavish devotion to habit. The narrator, Candace Chen, works at a specialty Manhattan book
publisher, overseeing the printing of specialty Bibles, "the purest form of product packaging, the same
content repackaged a million times over." Most of the production takes place in China, the source of the
fever and Candace's birthplace. She narrates the swift spread of the fungal infection, which begins to ravage
the city as she struggles, like many young New Yorkers, with whether she should pursue her artistic passion
(photography) or commit to her corporate job. The novel alternates between Candace's vivid descriptions of
increasingly plague-ridden, deserted New York and her eventual pilgrimage to an Illinois shopping mall
with a band of survivors, whose leader is a menacing former IT specialist. There are some suspense
elements, but the novel's strength lies in Ma's accomplished handling of the walking dead conceit to reflect
on what constitutes the good life. This is a clever and dextrous debut. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Severance." Publishers Weekly, 4 June 2018, p. 30. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542242823/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dbf77866.
Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542242823

• Vox
  https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/8/21/17722168/severance-ling-ma-review
  Word count: 897

  In the new novel Severance, the apocalypse looks a lot like another day at the office
  Ling Ma’s debut is a radically understated post-apocalyptic novel about boredom.
  By Constance Grady@constancegrady Aug 21, 2018, 9:00am EDT
  SHARE

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  Severance, a radically understated debut novel from Ling Ma, is about a zombie apocalypse. It is also about the soul-sucking nature of life under capitalism. In neither case is it joking.

  Severance revolves around a woman named Candace, who immigrated to the US from Fuzhou in China when she was 6 years old; as the novel opens, she is working at an art publisher, managing Bible production. In alternating chapters, Candace tells us the story of the world circa 2011, when she spends her days grinding her way through her dull job in New York — and the world a few months later, after the arrival of a plague known as Shen Fever. In that later timeline, Candace is part of a small sect of survivors trying to scrounge a survival out of what’s left of a Midwest ridden with plague.

  The apocalypse created by Shen Fever is only loosely a zombie apocalypse. Candace describes it as “a fever of repetition, of routine,” and its victims find themselves going through the motions of their daily lives, now emptied of meaning, again and again and again: A mother sets the table for her family and then resets it, a little girl pages through her favorite book while she holds it upside down, a young woman tries on all of her clothes. As the fever grips them, the afflicted lose the ability to do anything but recreate their old patterns, and so they slowly starve to death and rot from within.

  But as Ma’s dispassionate prose makes clear, the life of a Shen Fever victim is not significantly different from the life of an office drone. Candace is an aspiring artist who does not particularly want to work in Bible production, and who is a little grossed out by the way it forces her to push for lower wages and poorer working conditions in the Chinese factories where her Bibles are made, but she makes her way through her empty, meaningless routine nonetheless.

  Rating

  Meanwhile, Candace’s post-apocalyptic life bears an uncomfortable resemblance to her professional life. The group of survivors she joins gradually develops cult-like attributes — members have to participate in regular prayers and obey arbitrary rules, and those who disobey are punished harshly — but the leader is less a charismatic Charles Manson and more a petty middle manager. He used to be an IT guy. His name is Bob.

  “How do you like it here so far, being with us, I mean? Do you think we’re the right fit for you?” Bob asks Candace after she’s been in the group for a few days. “I’d like you to be more participatory, if possible,” he says.

  The fact that Bob is amusingly pathetic doesn’t stop him from making Candace’s life hell — and the fact that her pre-apocalypse job is low-stakes and boring doesn’t stop that boss from making Candace’s life hell either. In the sect, she has to lead group prayer and gets locked up in an empty L’Occitane store when she breaks the rules; at work, she has nightmares about thin Bible paper ripping on the presses.

  Ma’s critique of capitalism is not particularly subtle or particularly original, but it is searingly underplayed. Candace’s affect is as dry as the Sahara; you feel exactly how worn down she has become by the system under which she lives.

  Ma’s critique is also intersectional. She is thoughtful about how the capitalism of the West oppresses the factory workers of the East; in one passage, Candace has to find a cheap supplier of faux gemstones for a Bible, even though she has explained to her client that making the gems quickly creates a gritty, dust-laden air that will kill the workers who produce them. That the Shen Fever originates in China feels grimly ironic: It’s one last “made in China” for the end of the world.

  Throughout, Severance operates with severe restraint. Candace is a closed-off character who rarely feels much beyond a kind of soul-crushing ennui, and her voice is relentlessly understated. But there’s a power to the restraint, and an elegance to the understatement: It grinds you down slowly, the way riding the New York City subway does, so that you’ve barely noticed that you’re in the middle of something terrible before you’re used to it. It’s apocalypse by commute. And in that banality, there is enormous force.

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• Chicago Tribune
  http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/sc-books-severance-ling-ma-0815-story.html
  Word count: 948

  Review: Ling Ma's 'Severance' a gripping bildungsroman in the midst of an apocalypse
  ‘Severance’ by Ling Ma, Farrar
  "Severance" by Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
  Trine Tsouderos
  Chicago Tribune
  How do you fit a zombie novel inside an immigrant story inside a coming-of-age tale? Ling Ma, an assistant professor of arts at the University of Chicago, accomplished this feat in her gripping and original turducken of a novel, “Severance,” which follows a young Chinese-American as she tries to survive in the wake of a pandemic that kills or “zombifies” most of the U.S. population.

  The book is set in the near-present post-apocalypse and, through flashbacks, the near-past. The main character is Candace Chen, a millennial Chinese immigrant. Before the apocalypse, Chen was a worker bee at a New York City book production company manufacturing Bibles. Post-apocalypse, she’s pulled into a cult made up of survivors heading to the Chicago suburbs. The story alternates between Candace’s life before and after the apocalypse, working toward an ending that is genuinely surprising.

  Ma manages to make both periods — pre- and post-apocalypse — fascinating and distinct from one another. The sections about Chen’s past in New York City are lyrical, vividly detailed and fresh. She breathes new life into the crowded Manhattan-bildungsroman genre by focusing heavily on the Bible-manufacturing industry, which takes the 20-something Chen to Hong Kong and the nearby Chinese factory city of Shenzhen and back.

  Here’s Chen, in a passage about business decisions made for one Bible:

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  The Daily Grace Bible was an everyday Bible for casual use, but Three Crosses Publishing also wanted to imbue the product with a high-value feel of an heirloom. In order to hit the publisher’s target cost, substitutions had been made. The cover was made of leather-like polyurethane instead of leather. The book block edges boasted copper-hued spray edge duller compared to the more expensive gold gilding. The ribbon markers were made of sateen instead of silk. ... The Daily Grace Bible sold very well. I’d always felt fond of it, maybe because it was the least ostentatious Bible I’d produced.

  Post-disaster, Ma injects menace and violence into Chen’s story, as she heads to Chicago with a band of survivors led by a frightening cult figure named Bob. The swift changes in mood between the lyrical past and the horrific present lend the novel texture and a sense of propulsion and suspense. People die. People are killed. Everyone in the band lives in a state of paranoia and fear of Bob, who carries guns and forces the group to listen to long lectures on the meaning of life.

  Underneath this suspenseful zombie story is a deeper one about the immigrant experience and growing up. In “Severance,” Ma seems to be linking the process of becoming an American and the process of becoming an adult, and likening both of these processes to a violent severing from the past. Throughout the novel, Chen, who came to the United States from China as a 6-year-old, looks back at her Chinese childhood with deep nostalgia. She dreams about China, and her work trips to China make her feel both Chinese and not Chinese at all. She fantasizes about returning to her birthplace in Fuzhou.

  In my imagining, I return from New York. I do whatever my uncles say. I relearn Mandarin. I relearn Fujianese. I get married to another Fujianese. I live here, in beautiful, sunny, tropical Fuzhou, Fujian, fenced in by towering mountains and bounded by a boundless sea through which everyone leaves, where the palm trees sway and the nights run so late. I am so happy.

  Ma sees this nostalgia as destructive, even deadly. The virus — Shen Fever, it is called in the book — zombifies its victims by destroying their brains with obsessive nostalgia for the past. “Fevered” victims re-enact the same scenes and actions in their homes, over and over, madly, until they die or are put out of their misery by Bob and his gang. In one scene, a mother sets the dining room table, over and over and over, no longer a person, just a shell of one stuck on an endless loop through a moment from the past. At one point, one of Bob’s band becomes afflicted with Shen Fever after she returns to her childhood home and begins trying on dresses hanging in her closet. “I looked at her eyes, upside down. They were open but unfocused. They didn’t register me. The pupils didn’t move,” Chen says, describing her friend as she becomes entranced by her past.

  Chen’s challenge is to break free of that nostalgic pull and become her own person, to become an adult who makes her own decisions. In the post-apocalypse present, she needs to break free of Bob, in particular, who imposes his will on the group with confident pronouncements that make no sense. She cannot rely on him for her safety, or to tell her what life means. Adulthood, Ma appears to be saying, is about seeing these authority figures for what they are and striking out on your own, even if that path means facing the apocalypse alone.

  Trine Tsouderos is a freelancer.

  ‘Severance’
  By Ling Ma, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $26

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/08/19/639251266/in-severance-the-world-ends-not-with-a-bang-but-a-memo
  Word count: 905

  REVIEW
  BOOK REVIEWS
  In 'Severance,' The World Ends Not With A Bang, But A Memo
  August 19, 20187:00 AM ET
  MICHAEL SCHAUB

  Severance
  Severance
  by Ling Ma

  Hardcover, 291 pages purchase

  If you've spent much time reading personal essays on the Internet, then (a) you're a masochist, and (b) you've probably noticed a subgenre of the form that involves the author explaining why they left New York. The pieces are usually bittersweet and elegiac; seldom, if ever, do they say "My company transferred me to the Denver office" or "I just got tired of paying $20 for a hamburger."

  In a way, Ling Ma's shocking and ferocious novel, Severance, is a play on the "Why I left New York" theme, but it's one you'll actually want to read. The novel's protagonist, Candace Chen, departs the city she's called home for years not because of a tough job market or skyrocketing rent, but because the world as we know it is coming to an end. It's a fierce debut from a writer with seemingly boundless imagination.

  Candace's life in New York might not be what she dreamed of, but it's not all that bad. She has a respectable job at a publishing production firm, where she outsources printing jobs to facilities in China. She and her boyfriend pass the time watching movies in his basement apartment. As a hobby, she maintains NY Ghost, a blog featuring her photographs of life in the city.

  But then things start to get complicated. A mysterious disease called Shen Fever, a fungal infection that originated in China, starts to move through the country, turning its victims into, essentially, zombies. The death count rises so quickly that the news media, fearing a panic, stops reporting it.

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  Soon, Candace is — as near as she can tell — one of the only living people in the nation. "After the End came the Beginning," she explains. "And in the Beginning, there were eight of us, then nine — that was me — a number that would only decrease. We found one another after fleeing New York for the safer pastures of the countryside." Their ragtag group is led by Bob, a humorless IT specialist who promises to lead them to a safe place called "the Facility" in a Chicago suburb.

  They group gathers supplies by going on "stalks" — expeditions into houses, some filled with living but infected people. They execute any ailing residents and loot the homes. "We were ashamed of leaving people behind, of taking our comforts where we could find them, of stealing from those who could not defend themselves. We had known ourselves to be cowards and hypocrites, pernicious liars really, and to find this suspicion confirmed was not a relief but a horror."

  By the time they reach the Facility, Candace has soured on the destination and the group's Svengali leader: "The Facility means more to Bob than just a place to live. It is the manifestation of his shoddy ideology. He dictates and enforces the rules, rules that only he fully knows and understands. He sees us as subjects, to reward or to punish." Something has to give. And it does.

  ... while 'Severance' works beautifully as a horror novel, there's much more to it than that. It's a wicked satire of consumerism and work culture.

  Severance goes back and forth in time, contrasting Candace's tedious office job with her travels across post-apocalyptic America. It's a technique Ma uses to great effect — it's jarring in a great way, making the horror of her new circumstances all the more intense. It works especially well in the novel's most terrifying scene, when Bob orders Candace to execute a young, ailing girl — directly afterwards, Ma shifts scenes to Candace's job interview, where she tries to explain to an executive why she'd be good at overseeing the production of Bibles.

  And while Severance works beautifully as a horror novel, there's much more to it than that. It's a wicked satire of consumerism and work culture — the character of Bob comes across as a typical, power-hungry middle manager; Ma seems to be suggesting that even in the event of an apocalypse, you can't escape pointless bureaucracy. But Ma never overplays her hand — art that's critical of capitalism (or any political or economic system) can turn didactic and humorless very quickly, and Severance never does.

  That's in part because of Ma's exceptionally dry sense of humor. Severance is the kind of satire that induces winces rather than laughs, but that doesn't make it any less entertaining — Ma exhibits an admirable restraint throughout the novel, never giving in to tired clichés or overwrought sermonizing. It's a stunning, audacious book with a fresh take on both office politics and what the apocalypse might bring: This is the way the world ends, Ma seems to be saying, not with a bang but a memo.

• AV Club
  https://aux.avclub.com/in-the-zombie-apocalypse-of-ling-ma-s-severance-the-re-1828173796
  Word count: 968

  REVIEWS
  In the zombie apocalypse of Ling Ma’s Severance, the real monsters are the living

  Samantha Nelson
  8/13/18 1:00pmFiled to: BOOK REVIEW
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  Image: Emma McKhann
  In an early chapter of Ling Ma’s debut novel, Severance, a genre-savvy character details the difference between vampire and zombie stories. “With vampire narrative, the danger lies in the villain’s intentions, his underlying character. There are good vampires, there are bad vampires… [The zombie narrative is] not about a specific villain. One zombie can be easily killed, but a hundred zombies is another issue. Only amassed do they really pose a threat. The narrative, then, is not about any individual entity, per se, but about an abstract force: the force of the mob, of mob mentality.”

  BOOK REVIEW
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  Severance
  AUTHOR
  Ling Ma

  PUBLISHER
  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Severance isn’t quite either sort of story. Set in an alternate 2011, where a fungal infection called Shen Fever turns most of the world into the walking dead, it lacks the fear and violence found in traditional zombie stories. The Fevered are driven not by endless hunger or rage but familiar routine, quietly repeating activities, like watering houseplants or setting tables, until they die of starvation. That leaves Ma free to explore the other big theme of zombie narratives—that the true monsters aren’t the dead, but the living.

  Ma’s winding novel follows Candace Chen, a first-generation Chinese immigrant working for a New York book publisher. While she longs to be one of the “art girls” who put together photography and fashion design collections, she’s spent years languishing in Bible production. Every year is a new struggle to package the world’s bestselling book; Candace is tasked with coordinating with Chinese partners to keep the productions affordable. As the world starts to fall apart around her, Candace’s last job is to make sure a set of Bibles accompanied by jewelry for young girls gets made for a client that does not care that the process might be killing workers.

  The book’s critique of late capitalism is scathing if not especially subtle. Candace is both a nuanced individual and a stand-in for an entire generation of millennials regularly attacked by elders for their perceived weaknesses even as the fallout of the Great Recession leaves them stuck in unfulfilling jobs. Setting the story in 2011 instead of an amorphous near future allows Ma to muse about the failed promise of Occupy Wall Street, the movement here crumbling due to the spreading infection. When her boyfriend tries to persuade Candace to quit her job and engage in creative pursuits, she feels too trapped by security to take the leap. Even as her friends beg her to leave the heavily infected city, Candace lingers and takes increasingly radical steps to make sure she shows up to work every day.

  While occasionally dipping into the past for touching scenes about Candace’s childhood in China or her parents’ early days in America, the narrative largely alternates between Candace’s life in New York before civilization collapsed and her time running with a band of plague survivors. Both have aspects of absurdism, with the survivors led by an IT professional named Bob who’s become a sort of cult leader, guiding his flock to a mysterious facility in the Chicago suburbs where they can start a new life. Bob ordains that the Fevered must be killed to mercifully free them from their behavioral loops, but his group is just as bound to ritual, their days filled with complicated pseudo-religious protocol for group bonding and raiding for supplies. Even a scavenging party on an unauthorized mission to find marijuana feels bound to perform the group’s version of grace before looting a home, though its prayer to be able to bestow its fellow survivors with a massive supply of weed is a lot funnier than the usual recitation.

  Just because Ma’s zombies are harmless, doesn’t mean Severance doesn’t have any horror. Severance regularly mixes the mundane or silly with the grotesque. A woman complaining about her elderly neighbor fumbling her keys takes a turn when it ends up marking her as one of New York’s first fever cases. The goofy prayer that the house gives over bountiful weed leads into a scene where Candace sees the maggot-ridden corpse of the home’s former occupant: “They dripped from his chin down to his threadbare T-shirt onto his belly. Flying maggots, larvae maggots, maggoty maggots, maggoted maggots, dancing their maggot mating dance all over his maggoted face.”

  While technically post-apocalyptic fiction, Severance shares as much with Then We Came To The End, Joshua Ferris’ meditation on the failure of an advertising agency, as it does with The Walking Dead; Ma plays with voice, alternating between the first-person singular and plural to show how easily an individual comes to identify as part of a collective and how hard it is to have that group fall apart. But, like 28 Days Later, it uses the end of the world to examine what is really important. As things get increasingly dire, people keep telling Candace to go be with her family despite her having no one to go to. She’s lonely in New York when it’s one of the most populous cities in the world, and she’s lonely when she might be only one of a dozen humans left in the United States. If zombie stories are about the terrible power of the mob, Severance asks what kind of life is left to anyone who tries to stand against it.

• NPR
  https://www.npr.org/2018/08/21/640570793/severance-is-a-sardonic-wake-up-call-for-all-of-us-stuck-in-routine
  Word count: 860

  REVIEW
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  'Severance' Is A Sardonic Wake-Up Call For All Of Us Stuck In Routine
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  August 21, 20183:36 PM ET
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  Fresh Air

  Severance
  Severance
  by Ling Ma

  Hardcover, 291 pages purchase

  There's a sentence at the beginning of Ling Ma's standout debut novel, Severance, that stopped me cold: "When you wake up in a fictitious world," one character tells another, "your only frame of reference is fiction."

  Lots of readers these days share the feeling that fiction, specifically apocalyptic fiction, best captures the mood of these precarious times. I say that and yet I'm not usually drawn to apocalyptic fiction. It's often somber and violent and I guess I'd rather read stories where things get better rather than worse. Ling Ma's Severance, however, is an unusual apocalyptic novel. Satiric and playful — as well as scary — it lends readers the assurance that humor will linger even as the world winds down to an end.

  The premise of Severance is that America and much of the rest of the world has been struck by something called Shen Fever — a fungal disease that originated in the factories of Southern China. Once infected, "the fevered," as they're called, forget to eat or bathe; instead, they "loop indefinitely," until they die, performing rote tasks like folding sweaters or vacantly turning the pages of a book over and over.

  The narrator who's describing this horror for us is named Candace Chen. Candace is a rootless first generation American. Her parents, who emigrated from China, are dead and, after college, Candace moved to New York, telling us she was, "carried by the tides of others." Eventually, Candace landed a job supervising the production of made-to-order Bibles like "the Outdoors Bible, housed in a lightweight steel case. ... [and] the Alternative Bible, featuring a blank cover and packaged with Sharpie markers for the alt-Christian teens to decorate however they want."

  Five years limp by, during which time Candace sustains a tepid relationship with her slacker boyfriend in Brooklyn and also curates her photo blog called NY Ghost that she fills with images of forgotten sites in the city. The irony is that when Shen Fever hits and Candace, for lack of better options, accepts an enormous bonus to stay in New York and keep the corporate headquarters open, NY Ghost becomes a vital link for survivors around the world to see updates from the increasingly empty city.

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  In Satirical 'Severance,' A Stricken Country Works Itself To Death
  When Candace finally rouses herself from her passivity, she's startled to realize that she may well be the last uninfected person in New York City. That's when she steels herself to walk through the mile-and-a-half, pitch-dark Lincoln Tunnel to escape to the mainland of New Jersey.

  Those events take place in flashbacks to the opening years of the 21st century; in the present-time of Severance, 2005 or so, Candace has already fallen in with a small band of survivors, all apparently immune to Shen Fever, who shelter together in a colossal midwestern shopping mall, availing themselves of the staples of the food court and the pungent cleansers in Bath & Body Works. But of course, the same tensions that infected the pre-fevered world seep into that mall and, before long, Candace is looking for the emergency exit.

  Ling Ma is an assured and inventive storyteller; believe me, I've only given the lightest of plot summaries here. She's also deft at making the familiar strange, such as when Candace decides to take advantage of the eerie pleasures of a fever-struck New York and browses by flashlight through the deserted Strand bookstore; or, luxuriously, eats her brown bag lunch alone in a booth of the vacant Bemelmans Bar.

  In 'Severance,' The World Ends Not With A Bang, But A Memo
  BOOK REVIEWS
  In 'Severance,' The World Ends Not With A Bang, But A Memo
  Like the best speculative fiction, Severance also aims for more than chills and thrills: without being preachy, Ling Ma's story reflects on the nature of human identity and how much the repetitive tasks we perform come to define who we are. That's why the images of the fevered in this novel are not only terrifying, but poignant: the fevered mother who keeps setting dinner dishes down amidst rotting food; the fevered taxi cab driver who'll keep on driving until gas runs out; and even un-fevered Candace herself, who has such trouble breaking away from the daily round of a job she doesn't even like.

  Ma's vivid apocalyptic novel is something of a sardonic wake-up call. After all, if the mythical Shen Fever struck the planet tomorrow, isn't it likely that many of us, once infected, would "loop indefinitely" by staring at a screen, repetitively texting or typing on a keyboard until the end drew near?

• Bust
  https://bust.com/books/194991-severance-ling-ma-review.html
  Word count: 536

  Ling Ma's “Severance” Is A Zombie Apocalypse Novel That Will Stay With You
  BY ERIKA W. SMITH IN BOOKS
  severance 205fb

  The apocalypse that Ling Ma creates in her debut novel Severance is all too easy to believe: “Shen Fever,” a mysterious disease, originates in Shenzhen, China and slowly spreads around the world, drawing media attention, panic, and uneasy joking—just like the 2014 ebola epidemic and the 2009 swine flu pandemic. But unlike ebola and swine flu, Shen Fever is always fatal...in a way. Those who catch it die, but their bodies live on, mechanically living out the routines of their daily lives—setting a table, turning the pages of a book—as their flesh begins to rot. They’re like zombies, but harmless zombies. So harmless that the survivors of Shen Fever can easily round them up and shoot them.

  One of those survivors is our lead character, Candace Chen, a first-generation Chinese-American millennial who was orphaned shortly before the epidemic began—which happens not in some amorphous present, but in 2011, in the midst of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Before the fever, Candace worked in specialty Bible production, finding the cheapest ways to outsource the production of fancy Bibles—often using Chinese factories, including some in Shenzen. As the fever slowly spreads, Candace keeps working, trekking for hours each morning from her apartment in Greenpoint through an increasingly deserted Manhattan to get to her office. She keeps up her mundane worker bee life in the face of the apocalypse because she's been promised a generous payout if she works until a certain date. But it's more than that, too—with the world falling apart, what else is she supposed to do? It's a satire of 21st century capitalism, both a funny and an empathetic one. As Candace's coworkers who have fled the city stop responding to her calls and emails, and the few who have stayed in the office with her decide to leave, Candace needs something else to do with her time. She begins documenting the empty ruins of Manhattan online, under the name NY Ghost.

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  Ma tells Candace's story in disjointed flashbacks, paired with a present timeline in which Candace has finally fled Manhattan and joined a group of survivors led by the power-hungry Bob. Bob has created creepy, cultlike rituals for his group to follow and is leading them on a pilgrimage to an abandoned mall in the suburbs of Chicago, where he intends to rebuild society. As they get closer to their destination, Candace and Bob increasingly butt heads, causing conflict that could be deadly for Candace.

  Like the 2014 post-apocalyptic literary novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (a book I love enormously), Ling Ma’s Severance focuses on the small, human details of a world in collapse, and shows how it's possible to rebuild that world. But unlike any other novel of its genre that I’ve read, the details of that apocalypse create resonances the main character’s experiences as a first-generation Chinese American. Ma’s descriptions of an abandoned, ruined Manhattan will stay with me—as will the character of Candace Chen.

• Paste
  https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/08/severance-by-ling-ma.html
  Word count: 547

  The Apocalypse Is Personal in Ling Ma's Severance
  By B. David Zarley | August 16, 2018 | 12:53pm
  BOOKS FEATURES LING MA
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  The Apocalypse Is Personal in Ling Ma's Severance
  Like so many works of popular fiction, Ling Ma’s debut novel is apocalyptic. Unlike most, Severance realizes that an anomic world offers a better chance to pose questions on an intimate level than a societal one.

  Ma’s dystopia is driven by Shen Fever, a pathogenic infection—fungal, a nice tweak of a microscopic detail which bodes well for the book as a whole—which arrives like the vengeance of the developing world. From the outsourced shores to her narrator Candace’s New York home, the fever sweeps across the globe, traveling along the same network of chains which once carried the cheaply produced goods, the curse of commerce made manifest. The victims’ peculiar pathology, wherein they tumble into a repetitive motion—setting the table; reading a book; modeling in a mirror; wandering a mall; a fatal dance with their desires—makes for some of the eeriest deaths since the bloodless victims of The Andromeda Strain.

  severance cover-min.pngWhat Ma accomplishes with her fever-stricken world is what sets Severance apart. Rather than take the end of days as a chance for the usual pontifications on societal collapse—most seemingly ignorant that we built society from nothing the first time, and we would certainly do it again—Ma uses the disaster trope for interrogation on a scale small enough to lacerate.

  Candace is a first-generation Chinese immigrant, a project manager who ensures Bibles are made in Southeast Asia and China at cost, on time and with souvenir gemstones intact (worker’s lungs be damned). Then the pandemic hits, and she survives. When she’s not wandering the desolate stretch between New York and Chicago with her fellow survivors, she’s detailing her time before Shen Fever. From the challenges of living with a family trapped between two cultures to coming-of-age drama, Candace intersperses the usual intimacies of a wordier lit with the trappings of the genre piece her life has become. It’s the tensions between the two that prove Ma’s skill and provide a compelling reason for reading.
  By focusing on such small-scale issues in the wake of a catastrophe, Ma illuminates a person in the dystopia. Candace’s world is slowly dismantled, her mind buried in work, her eyes in a camera’s viewfinder, until it has dissolved away. There is little to fear or to forget. Where so many other works falter is in their failure to do the same.

  Severance’s sickness is a personal one, availing itself to the economics of scale just as corporations—or diseases—do.

  B. David Zarley is a freelance journalist, essayist and book/art critic based in Chicago. A former book critic for The Myrtle Beach Sun News, he is a contributing reporter to A Beautiful Perspective and has been seen in The Atlantic, Hazlitt, Jezebel, Chicago, Sports Illustrated, VICE Sports, Creators, Sports on Earth and New American Paintings, among numerous other publications. You can find him on Twitter or at his website.

• BookPage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/22980-ling-ma-severance
  Word count: 590

  BOOK REVIEWS

  Severance
  Ling Ma
  BookPage review by Cat Acree

  Web Exclusive – August 03, 2018

  The fevered victims of Ling Ma’s astounding debut novel aren’t exactly zombies. As their bodies fall apart, they’re not bumbling about the ruined world or trying to kill you. Instead, they enact and re-enact the rituals of their former day-to-day lives. Retail workers fold shirts in empty stores. Old women laugh at the television and change the channel. Families mime the act of sitting down for dinner, chatting about their days; they clear the plates and do it again. In the world of Severance, the drone of normal life becomes a buzz too loud to ignore.

  The novel follows the story of Candace Chen, the 20-something daughter of Chinese immigrant parents whose mother has recently died of Alzheimer’s. Candace splits her narrative into two timelines: before Shen Fever decimates the global population (she calls this “the End”) and after (“the Beginning”). In the End, she works in the Bible production department of a New York City publishing company. She has a boyfriend named Jonathan with whom she watches classic New York City movies. As Shen Fever begins to spread, Candace continues to work—until she is one of the only living humans in New York, capturing the deserted metropolis via photographs posted to her anonymous blog, NY Ghost.

  In the Beginning, Candace has joined a group of survivors led by a man named Bob. Bob leads the group on “stalks” into homes throughout the Midwest, gathering supplies and killing any of the fevered. The stalks are enacted as ritual, the survivors conducting a type of prayer over each house they enter. There is repetition here as well. The internet once rendered this world “nearsighted with nostalgia,” as Bob says, and the Beginning is supposed to be a second chance. But the stalks are laden with memories of who we once were. The fevered are even described as having the eyes of someone who is incessantly checking their phone, or who is staring at their computer, glazed and unseeing.

  “It was like burrowing underground and the deeper I burrowed the warmer it became, and the more the nothing feeling subsumed me, snuffing out any worries and anxieties. It is the feeling I like best about working,” Candace says of one of these stalks, though she easily could’ve been referring to a Bible she’s working on, or when she’s drifting about the city as NY Ghost, or even when she’s moisturizing her face.

  Ma’s engrossing, masterfully written 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. It’s just an office novel, after all, with some worker-bee politics and consideration of the commute, the lunch break, the after-work cocktails. But Severance demands to be wondered at, only to flip around the gaze and stare back at you.

  To be a millennial is to have been betrayed by an economy that once promised you everything. So after that fails, where do you look for yourself? In religion, in family, in memories on the internet? As a reader of Candace’s blog writes to her, “How do we know . . . that you’re not fevered yourself?”

  ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Behind the Book feature from Ling Ma.