Review by New York Times Review
A SOLITARY WOMAN in her 20s stands outside of the Juicy Couture flagship shop in Midtown Manhattan, watching a salesperson fold a "candy rainbow" of velour tracksuits. A superstorm and fever epidemic have decimated New York, but the shopkeeper, who is missing half of her jaw, folds with rote acuity. Candace, the protagonist of Ling Ma's debut novel, "Severance," is frequently enraptured while observing the routines of those around her. "You could lose yourself this way," Candace says, "watching the most banal activities cycle through on an infinite loop. It is a fever of repetition, of routine." Five days per week, Candace's own regimen involves walking unemployed through the city, her mind "drained until empty." Keeping her own proverbial business hours, she wafts through the streets propelled by a "deep, grim satisfaction." In the evening, as people traipse home, she chronicles their "hanging spider ferns in wicker baskets, calico cats lounging on throw pillows," and wonders if she could live indefinitely in this liminal state - just imagining herself into the lives of others. Eventually Candace begins a job in an office, and it's at this point that a pulsing refrain begins: "I got up. I went to work in the morning. I went home in the evening. I repeated the routine." Work is trancelike and Candace submerges herself in it. At her swank publishing company, she's overseen the production of so many Bibles that she instinctively dissociates the holy book into its components, "disassembling it down to its varied, assorted offal." "Severance" offers blatant commentary on "dizzying abundance" and unrelenting consumption, evolving into a semi-surreal sendup of a workplace and its utopia of rules, not unlike Joshua Ferris's "Then We Came to the End." Ma revivifies this model. Set against the backdrop of a catastrophic illness - Shen Fever, which results in a "fatal loss of consciousness" - the novel draws a circle around the lives of Candace's office cohort and the fever-stricken. Both live in an "infinite loop" that marks them as "creatures of habit, mimicking old routines and gestures they must have inhabited for years, decades." Candace's uninfected state is not all that divorced from that of the fevered, who exist in an interstitial stage of "residual humanity." But laced within its dystopian narrative is an encapsulation of a first-generation immigrant's nostalgia for New York, a place where, as Candace notes, "most people have already lived, in some sense, in the public imagination, before they ever arrive." Ma conjures the expat protagonist of Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland," who argues that "we are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness." In its most lucid moments, "Severance" evokes traces of, if not Meghan Daum in her "misspent youth," then the essay "Goodbye to All That," when a young and equally bemused Joan Didion looks at gleaming kitchens through brownstone windows, considering New York not as a place of residence but as a romantic notion: "One does not 'live' at Xanadu." Candace dips elliptically into her past, unfurling memories of her dead parents and her childhood in China. When she recalls her mother telling her stories, "her remembering elicited my remembering." Though she lingers on long after most have fled or perished, Candace eventually departs New York in a "nostalgia-yellow" taxi and joins a group of survivors who find her outside the city. "After the End came the Beginning," Ma writes in the opening line of the prologue. The cultlike group's self-appointed leader pulls on a French vanilla- scented e-cigarette and sermonizes that "the internet is the flattening of time." The survivors "theorized grandly" and Google the states of grief, "Is there a god," Maslow's pyramid. They end up living in an abandoned mall - an inversion of life in which the department stores are communal spaces and the boutiques are personal rooms. In the parallel dystopian universe of Adam Nemett's debut, "We Can Save Us All," David lives in the Egg, an off-campus end-times cult where a group of Princeton undergrads toy "with drugs and, you know, the fabric of time and stuff." The end of the world is not yet upon us, but the group is faced with both a climate emergency and something called "chronostrictesis," a condition in which time itself is running out, and only the drug Zeronal can slow down one's experience of it. A contained community of its own, the earnest "Unnamed Supersquadron of Vigilantes," hunkers down in a geodesic dome, pulsing with dogged optimism for the future world - as Mathias, its leader, says: "It's going to be our job to make that smaller world into a close-knit community." Nemett's book swerves between speculative coming-of-age fiction, a superhero story and an apocalyptic campus novel. At one point when a character describes the squad's plans, "he jumps from topic to topic. Nietzsche to chronostrictesis to education to moral determinism to his own disappearing hands." David presides over what reads at times like a Marvel movie action sequence being recounted by a stranger in the ticket line. Though the Egg's residents are hopeful about the future, Nemett's novel assumes a bleak and sophomoric inner life for these students: "Ultimately, he knew it was selfish and sexist, but he still wanted to save the day, the way superheroes do. But saving the day is so impersonal. Saving the girl, though?" Such is just one of the comicbook tropes he unflinchingly deploys throughout the book; David whispers observations like "superheroes never die" and "knowledge can become a superpower," and uses a nasty and condescending nickname (itself reminiscent of comic books) for the main female character. After sleeping with her, David declares, "They'd be together now, superheroes flying through the air." But I begrudgingly found the sincerities of both Nemett and his characters refreshing in their vulnerability: "David only and infinitely believed in" Mathias. Nemett captures a group whose unfettered exuberance is seldom found in today's novels. There's no final act in which they're heroically rescued by self-awareness; the group remains forever "masters of denial, impervious to reality." If this were a choose-your-own-disaster adventure, I'd sooner end up in the shopping mall apocalypse. Laced within Ma's dystopian narrative is an arresting encapsulation of a first-generation immigrant's nostalgia for New York. ANTONIA HITCHENS has written for The New Yorker, where she was formerly on the editorial staff.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* With apocalyptic fiction having become so popular a genre, how does one approach it with originality, avoiding the too-familiar reference points? Embracing the genre but somehow transcending it, Ma creates a truly engrossing and believable anti-utopian world. Ma's cause for civilization's collapse is a pandemic. Shen Fever spreads through fungal spores, causing its victims to lethargically repeat menial tasks, ignoring all external stimuli, including the need for sustenance. Prognosis is terminal. Candace Chen, a rare survivor of the outbreak, blogs anonymously as NY Ghost on a slowly disintegrating internet, capturing the horror of what has happened in her photographs of an empty New York City, where she lived when the fevered started dying. The narrative flashes back to Candace's life before the end, working for a book-manufacturing company in the Bibles department; spending free time watching movies with her on-and-off boyfriend, Jonathan; and longing for the seemingly fulfilled lives of other millennials her age. Candace's story also crosses that of a group led by a former IT specialist named Bob, who seems to be suffering from a messiah complex. Ma's extraordinary debut marks a notable creative jump by playing on the apocalyptic fears many people share today, as we live in these very interesting times. Pair Severance with Adam Sternbergh's similarly disturbing Shovel Ready (2014).--Ruzicka, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT Candace Chen arrives in New York City postcollege because "it seemed like the inevitable, default place to go." After a summer of wandering Manhattan wearing her dead mother's dresses-taking pictures and getting picked up-she unexpectedly falls into a publishing job. She settles into a Brooklyn apartment, finds a freespirited boyfriend, and five years pass. Then Shen Fever hits, rapidly spreading gruesome death across the globe. Candace inexplicably remains immune. The city empties, becoming the "NY Ghost" Candace ironically named her photo blog in more vibrant times. On the final day of her work contract, she commandeers a yellow cab as far as Pennsylvania, where she becomes the ninth-and last-member of a motley crew who might be the only survivors. Their destination: "the Facility." The end looms but Candace is, well, just beginning. Debut author Ma, who won the 2015 Graywolf SLS Prize for best novel excerpt with a chapter from this book, presents a smart, searing exposé on the perils of consumerism, Google overload, and millennial malaise. Verdict With womb dystopia a hot topic inspired by the renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, an already established audience will be eager to discover this work. [See Prepub Alert, 2/11/18.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A post-apocalypticand pre-apocalypticdebut. 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 assistantshe helps publishers make specialty Biblesbut 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
