Book 635: Severance – Ling Ma

I’ve been digesting this one for a little over a week as I write this (it’s posting much later than that). I very much enjoyed the work, but I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

The story follows first generation immigrant Candace Chen after an apocalyptic virus has decimated the human population creating habit zombies. You loose all higher function and go about doing a habit/routine until you die. The problems that Candace faces (and even creates in some occasions) are uniquely urban and (predominantly) millennial.

The title hints at what I think the central theme is, but I rarely make guesses on that so I’m probably so far off it’s laughable. I think Candace rather than growing up just severs ties with whatever it is that is causing her grief/issues/troubles. When her dad dies, when her mom dies, when the virus happens, when work gets tough, when work finishes, when she hits a road block. It’s easier for her to cut ties and move-on rather than try to solve the problem and/or work around it. I think a lot of people can identify with this (especially around relationships).

What makes her story unique is her being a first generation immigrant (she’s brought to the US when she’s under 10) and her dual heritage of being Chinese and American. She has the pressures to be the perfect Chinese child and the perfect American child, and those aren’t always working in concert with each other. The self-reflection in her thoughts, and in ghost conversations with her mother are very telling of this:

“The fruits of my immigrant father’s lifelong efforts would be gobbled up and squandered by me, his lazy, disaffected daughter.” (Loc. 743)

“Just because you’re adequately good at something doesn’t mean that’s what you should do.” (Loc. 4,173)

“May you live long enough to see how little your children think of you.” (Loc. 4,113)

On top of the characters, Candace being the most fully developed and present—a lot of the others feel like caricatures or ghosts—Ma’s writing is incredibly beautiful. I struggled at first without quotation marks, but I’ve read other books before without them and I adjusted like usual. I found her sense of place and description of place to be poignant and spot on:

“New York is possibly the only place in which most people have already lived, in some sense, in the public imagination, before they ever arrive.” (Loc. 97)

“I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality. It is what enabled me to live there for so long, loving the idea of something more than the thing itself.” (Loc. 3,919)

Both New York and Chicago, and even the cities Candace visits in China, are better developed characters than some of the actual characters because of Ma’s writing.

I also found how she dealt with the loss of technology, something we are all so dependent on, fascinating. The response when Candace receives her broken iPhone back from the group that “rescues” her was exactly what you’d expect and the discussion of what the internet was and the loss of it worked perfectly,

“The internet is the flattening of time. It is the place where the past and the present exist on one single plane. But proportionally, because the present calcifies into the past, even now, even as we speak, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the internet almost wholly consists of the past. It is the place we go to commune with the past.” (Loc. 1,714)

I couldn’t help but compare Ma to Atwood, the queen of speculative fiction. Whereas Atwood slowly goes into details and reveals what happens to create her speculative works (The Handmaid’s Tale, MaddAddam trilogy here, here, and here), Ma shows a lot of restraint keeping the focus on the recent past and on the characters with little focus on anything else. I couldn’t decide whether I liked the Bob character and his pseudo-religious-cult-like leadership or if it was a cop-out. Why is it all post-apocalypse stories are either religion based or war-tribe/violence based? I’m sure there are others, but I feel like most fall into these two camps.

Recommendation: I enjoyed it more than I thought I would in the bleakness that is today. Ma’s writing is incredibly beautiful and the structure of the novel works really well (even if it seems a bit like The Handmaid’s Tale). I’m still not 100% sure about the ending. I didn’t hate it, but I did feel like it was the only one that worked with the protagonist’s M.O. and personality.

Opening Line: “After the End came the Beginning.”

Closing Line: “I get out and start walking.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)

Additional Quotes from Severance
“What do you call a cross between a yuppie and a hipster? A yupster. Per Urban Dictionary.” (Loc. 124)

“The Art Girls, for they were all invariably girls—colt-legged, flaxen-haired, in their late twenties, possessors of discounted Miu Miu and Prada, holders of degrees in Art History or Visual Studies, frequenters of gallery openings, swishers of pinot, nibblers of canapés—carried themselves like a rarefied breed, peacocking through the hallways in Fracas-scented flocks.” (Loc. 290)

“Those books aren’t mine! I wanted to yell, even though that was not true. They were all mine. My Ántonia. Windowlight. Namedropper. Crime and Punishment, the one thing I saved from freshman English. The Metamorphosis. The Sweet Valley High series, paperbacks of teen horror and sci-fi that I had pilfered from visits back home. Christopher Pike. R. L. Stine. Coming-of-agers. I Capture the Castle. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. A collection of defunct magazines from the nineties, Index being my favorite. How long had he been in there?” (Loc. 804)

“I switched back to English, changed the subject. How did you and Edgar get your names? I asked. They are not our real names, he said, following suit in English. They are just our business names, when we work with Western clients. How did you pick Balthasar? It’s unusual. It’s from Shakespeare. I choose from the best. He laughed. Then he asked, What is your Chinese name? I told him. Ah, very poetic, he said. It reminds me of the poem by Li Bai. It’s very famous. All the students in China study it. I didn’t know it. I couldn’t bear to ask him the name of the poem. I had no idea what my Chinese name meant, or that I was even named after a poem.” (Loc. 1,327)

“As media outlets closed, NY Ghost was the de facto news source of New York throughout the fall. Readers wrote in asking for pictures and dispatches from their old neighborhoods, their friends’ apartments, nostalgic sites. NY Ghost complied. Eventually, as the fever spread across the country, the queries dried up and not long after that, the blog came to a standstill.” (Loc. 1,642)

“There were other Nan Goldin photographs, her earlier work taken in the seventies and eighties. They were all of her friends; they existed on highly emotive planes, socializing in cars and on beaches, posturing at good-bad parties, picnicking chaotically, cleansing themselves in milky baths, sexing and masturbating and visiting each other in hospitals, lit up by the bald glare of the camera flash. When they laughed, they threw their heads back to reveal crooked, yellowed teeth. The city back then was almost bankrupt. Day and night seemed indistinguishable, the dividing line between them membranic. The party spectacles gave way to hospital scenes gave way to funeral tableaux. The AIDS epidemic seemed to strike overnight.” (Loc. 2,946)

“I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.” (Loc. 3,137)

“The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.” (Loc. 4,173)

“To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?” (Loc. 4,414)