Severance by Ling Ma

Memories beget memories. Shen Fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember, too, I remember perfectly. My memories replay, unprompted, on repeat. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop. We drive, we sleep, we drive some more.

A mysterious disease emerges from China. The U.S. border is shut down, but it's too late: the infection spreads uncontrollably. Things in China are even worse, we suspect, but the Chinese government keeps a tight lid on information coming out of the country. Americans try to protect themselves with mask, though not everyone believes they provide any protection at all. Basic services begin to fail; the supply chain buckles; people flee New York as it begins to collapse. Those who stay attempt to work from home, but without the interconnectedness of the modern world, things go quickly south.

In 2021, Ling Ma's Severance seems awfully prescient, doesn't it? What stands out the most is perhaps the ways in which Ma's imagination falls short of the real thing: the number of dead, for example, that provokes the U.S. to stop publishing statistics, is 280,000. (We're at 600,000 and counting.) The main character's employer offers a colossal sum to continue working from the office while everyone else transitions to remote work. This last bit seems particularly egregious, given how interested Severance is in the economic structures that seem both so fragile and so binding: of course, in the real world, many people have simply been forced into work. But these are not really criticisms, just grimly funny observations; in truth Severance seems to have gotten the shape and import of a 21st century global pandemic exactly right.

The protagonist, Candace Chen, is a Chinese-born American who, in her former life, works as a production director for a book publisher. Her job is in Bibles: sourcing the leather, the paper, the little gemstones attached to their most expensive product line. This work involves contracting Chinese companies; she travels between America and Shenzen and gives her a first-hand look at the realities of the global manufacturing economy. This job is exactly as fulfilling as you expect it might be, and she drifts through her New York existence in profound alienation: the second meaning of the word severance, and a state that the pandemic only intensifies. After the "Shen Fever" hits, she escapes the city, only to be captured by the megalomaniac leader of a group of travelers who sees her pregnancy as link to the future existence of humankind.

What I liked most about Severance is that it doesn't overexplain the connections between Candace's pre-pandemic profession and the reality of social collapse. Shen Fever, unlike Covid, is a fungal disease, and though it's not explicitly stated, one suspects that it travels around the world on the billions of products with MADE IN CHINA inscribed on them. Candace's own relationship to China, a country where all of her surviving family lives, but about which she remembers little, is a fraught one, circumscribed, like most Americans, by the logic of economics and production, rather than affection. "The future just wants more consumers," her boyfriend tells her, but Severance is a story about a future that consumes itself to death and is unable to stop. Sufferers of Shen Fever can often be discovered in zombie-like reenactments of what they loved most in life, and often this becomes acts of empty consumption: trying on clothes, walking around an abandoned mall. Severance describes a world in which production and consumption govern our most intimate and far-flung relationships, and suggests that the most frightening thing about those relationships somehow is the possibility of their collapse.