Wednesday, January 27, 2021
SEVERANCE by Ling Ma
Candace Chen is one of the few New York survivors—so far—of
a deadly pandemic caused by a fungus.
This novel has a before-and-after timeline. In the present, Candace is traveling
cross-country with a handful of other young adults, with their fanatically
religious leader Bob. In the pre-pandemic
world, Candace is a project manager for Bible production—a job that she does
not really like but that she is exceptionally good at. As her officemates begin to disappear, either
abandoning the city where the infrastructure is starting to crumble or succumbing
to the Shen Fever, Candace carries on, even after she no longer has any work to
do. Candace is a loner, declining her
boyfriend’s invitation to move out west with him, and her aloneness becomes
even more striking when the city becomes a ghost town. In fact, Candace resurrects her photo blog,
NY Ghost, and sees a kind of beauty in deserted subway stations and horse
carriages with no drivers. The title of
this book seems appropriate in a number of ways. Candace observes at one point that nostalgia
seems to make a person susceptible to the fever. In that case, she should be fine. She doesn’t seem to be nostalgic for how
things used to be, nor does she have other personal entanglements. Candace was born in China, as were her
now-deceased parents, but she has no family connections there to speak of. Her severance may be her emotional salvation.
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