Severance

Severance is Ling Ma's 2018 debut novel, the Kirkus Prize winner and the structural Asian-American literary pandemic novel that anticipated the broader 2020 American pandemic experience by approximately eighteen months. The structural premise is Candace Chen, a twenty-six-year-old Bible-production manager at a New York publishing house in 2011, continuing to commute to her office across the collapse of New York from the Shen Fever pandemic across late 2011 and early 2012. The novel cross-cuts the contemporary post-collapse Candace chapters (in which Candace has joined a small group of fevered-survivor-and-non-fevered-survivor refugees led by the security-consultant Bob across the Midwest, traveling toward Bob's proposed long-term Facility) with the embedded pre-collapse Candace chapters (in which Candace navigates her late-twenty-something New York Bible-production-and-immigrant-daughter life across the broader 2011 pre-collapse New York arc).

Ma's structural method is the patient cross-cutting between the contemporary post-collapse Midwest chapters and the embedded pre-collapse New York chapters, with the broader Bible-production-and-immigrant-daughter material providing the structural emotional weight that the entire pandemic-and-corporate-routine-and-immigrant-daughter arc requires. The Shen-Fever-as-routine-and-nostalgia material is the structural innovation of the novel; Ma's actual structural argument (that the Shen Fever produces a specific kind of nostalgic-and-routinized behavioral collapse in which the fevered continue to perform the operational routines of their former lives forever, that the contemporary American corporate-and-immigrant late-capitalist routine itself is a structural-and-emotional precursor to the fevered nostalgic collapse, and that the entire novel is structurally an argument about late-capitalist corporate routine as an existential condition) is made through the texture of the cross-cutting construction rather than through any direct argument.

Recommended as required contemporary Asian-American literary fiction reading, as the right Ma entry point alongside Bliss Montage (2022, story collection), and as one of the canonical 2010s American literary-pandemic novels. Compare to Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel), The Anomaly, Tomorrow x3, and contemporary American literary-pandemic-and-corporate fiction. The Nancy Wu audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.