Office politics at the end of the world
What Ling Ma's zombie novel Severance has to say about the flow of capital and the comfort of routine
Looking to take my mind off of current events, I picked up a novel about a mysterious airborne illness that originates in China and spreads worldwide, sickening millions while grinding the global economy to a crawl.
The book, Ling Ma’s debut novel Severance, came out in 2018. Its plot bears some resemblance to the current course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I’ll start with the eerie similarities. The disease in the novel is Shen Fever, nicknamed for its purported origin in Shenzhen (the infection is fungal, not viral like COVID-19). The symptoms resemble a bad cold at first, until the disease renders its victims zombie-like. The sickness spreads worldwide, followed by a predictable wave of misinformation and xenophobia.
Supply chains fall apart. Residents flee major cities. Professionals sort out the logistics of working from home while essential laborers face either unemployment or life-endangering shifts on the front lines. People go around in masks; one of the opening scenes features an office manager passing out a stash of N95 respirators that was inexplicably on hand.
The premonitions of 2020 feel uncanny at first, but they are easily the least interesting parts of Ma’s novel. Any writer could have skimmed the red-flag reports about the potential for pandemics under global capitalism and written a similar outline for a piece of speculative fiction. Ma did something more ambitious. She wrote about the flow of capital and the inertia of habit.
Ma said in an interview with The Paris Review that she started writing the novel during her final months working an office job at a company that eventually laid off many of its employees; at the time she was just writing an “apocalyptic short story.” The apocalyptic content is mild compared to more traditional modern zombie novels like Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. The “fevered,” as they are called, do not develop superhuman strength or a taste for human flesh. They just stumble on in their daily routines, clocking in at the office and tapping mindlessly at keyboards and so on. They are objects of pity, not fear.
Ma’s first inspiration was frustration at work, which may explain why much of the novel reads more like a workplace satire than a piece of zombie horror.
The story follows Candace Chen, a daughter of Chinese immigrants working for a book production company in New York City. Her job is to coordinate the printing, binding, and shipping of Bibles, working with suppliers in Southeast Asia. She finds the work meaningless and at times morally compromising, but she works diligently anyway.
Before Shen Fever hits, Candace’s work is disrupted by a more prosaic illness: Manufacturers in Shenzhen and Fuzhou are stricken with pneumoconiosis after inhaling dust from unsafe work environments, and Candace has to scramble to find backup suppliers while Christian booksellers breathe down her neck on a deadline.
And then the fever hits New York, and Candace decides to keep going in to the office long after her coworkers have deserted the city. Her motivations are not fully explained. She has a contract to fulfill, but it’s not apparent whether the contract will be honored, or whether the other parties to that contract are even still alive.
“The question I kept trying to figure out was, Why does Candace Chen keep working at her job?” Ma said in her interview.
Capital keeps circulating long after most human institutions have collapsed. Candace keeps emailing suppliers in China to follow up on the status of orders, only to find out most of the workers are dead or at home with their families. People are still attached to notions of private property; Candace considers renting an apartment in Midtown Manhattan after the city has been practically abandoned. Rent is cheap now, she reasons, and it would be nice to live closer to the office.
Marx defined capital as “value in motion,” and that motion is sustained by laws of man, not nature. I was thinking about that definition as I finished reading the novel this week. There are human zombies in this book, but there is also a sense in which the economy is undead.
I don’t mean to be reductionist. Severance is so much more than a work of economic analysis. Candace’s motivation has as much to do with capitalism as it does with the work ethic her parents instilled in her, and with her loneliness in a country where she has no living relatives. There is also comfort in familiar work when the world falls apart.
Severance also has a good deal to say about nostalgia, disaster tourism, the collapse of the journalism industry, gender politics, millennial coming-of-age, and immigrant experiences with organized religion. The book plays with classic zombie tropes, including some deliberate nods to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. It is the best piece of fiction I have read this year.
There are many scenes and images that keep coming back to me, but I will share this one: After the city has been mostly abandoned, Candace goes around documenting the empty streets and buildings for a photography blog she started, trying to toe the line between documentary and exploitation. Amid the looted stores and decaying infrastructure, she comes across the flagship Juicy Couture store (the book is set in 2011). The storefront is untouched; the velour and terry sweatsuits are laid out “into a candy rainbow.”
She writes:
I noticed movement inside. It was a saleslady, folding and re-folding pastel polo shirts. She was clearly good at her job, even in her fevered condition. The wall of bedazzled sunglasses gleamed. The wall of handbags was artfully arranged, by model and by color.
The subsequent post was a thirty-second video of the saleslady folding T-shirts. I tried to show it from a distance; I didn’t want the video to be too graphic. Half her jaw was missing. But the way she folded each garment, with an economy of movement, never breaking pace, generated a sense of calm and ease.
There are moments of cold comfort in this novel that feel relevant to the present moment. Familiar landscapes and cityscapes feel alien, but people carry on inside them by the coercion of capital, or at times by the comfort of routine.
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If you would like to order a copy, Severance was printed in the U.S.A. and is available for order via Bookshop for $15.64. You can browse and order other books that I’ve mentioned in the newsletter on the Brutal South Bookshop page.
In case you missed it, the debut episode of my podcast was an interview with my neighborhood bookseller about the state of the book industry and the possibility of resisting the Amazon leviathan. You can listen to it via the episode page, or you can subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
If you are a Twitter person, you might get a kick out of this piece of choose-your-own-adventure Weird Fiction I wrote on that platform this week. Click through to see if you can escape the lockdown.
Excellent review! When my "to read" stack gets a little more manageable, Severance is going in the queue.