Cogent coming-of-age tale in midst of an apocalypse
How do you fit a zombie novel inside an immigrant story inside a coming-ofage tale? Ling Ma, an assistant professor of arts at the University of Chicago, accomplished this feat in her gripping and original turducken of a novel, “Severance,” which follows a young Chinese-American as she tries to survive in the wake of a pandemic that kills or “zombifies” most of the U.S. population.
The book is set in the near-present post-apocalypse and, through flashbacks, the near-past. The main character is Candace Chen, a millennial Chinese immigrant. Before the apocalypse, Chen was a worker bee at a New York City book production company manufacturing Bibles. Post-apocalypse, she’s pulled into a cult made up of survivors heading to the Chicago suburbs. The story alternates between Candace’s life before and after the apocalypse, working toward an ending that is genuinely surprising.
Ma manages to make both periods — pre- and post-apocalypse — fascinating and distinct from one another. The sections about Chen’s past in New York City are lyrical, vividly detailed and fresh. She breathes new life into the crowded Manhattanbildungsroman genre by focusing heavily on the Bible manufacturing industry, which takes the 20-something Chen to Hong Kong and the nearby Chinese factory city of Shenzhen and back.
Here’s Chen, in a passage about business decisions made for one Bible:
The Daily Grace Bible was an everyday Bible for casual use, but Three
Crosses Publishing also wanted to imbue the product with a high-value feel of an heirloom. In order to hit the publisher’s target cost, substitutions had been made. The cover was made of leather-like polyurethane instead of leather. The book block edges boasted copperhued spray edge duller compared to the more expensive gold gilding. The ribbon markers were made of sateen instead of silk . ... The Daily Grace Bible sold very well. I’d always felt fond of it, maybe because it was the least ostentatious Bible I’d produced.
Post-disaster, Ma injects menace and violence into Chen’s story, as she heads to Chicago with survivors led by a cult figure named Bob. The changes in mood between the lyrical past and the horrific present lend the novel texture and a sense of propulsion and suspense. People die. Everyone in the band lives in a state of paranoia and fear of Bob, who carries guns and lectures on the meaning of life.
Underneath this suspenseful zombie story is a deeper one about the immigrant experience and growing up. In “Severance,” Ma seems to be linking the process of becoming an American and the process of becoming an adult, and likening both to a violent severing from the past. Throughout the novel, Chen, who came to America from China as a 6-year-old, looks back at her childhood with deep nostalgia. She dreams about China, and her work trips to China make her feel both Chinese and not Chinese at all. She fantasizes about returning to her birthplace in Fuzhou.
Ma sees this nostalgia as destructive, even deadly. The virus — Shen Fever, it is called in the book — zombifies its victims by destroying their brains with obsessive nostalgia for the past. “Fevered” victims re-enact the same scenes and actions in their homes, madly, until they die or are put out of their misery by Bob and his gang. At one point, one of Bob’s band becomes afflicted with Shen Fever after she returns to her childhood home and begins trying on dresses. “I looked at her eyes, upside down. They were open but unfocused. They didn’t register me. The pupils didn’t move,” Chen says, describing her friend.
Chen’s challenge is to break free of that nostalgic pull and become an adult who makes her own decisions. Post-apocalypse, she needs to break free of Bob, in particular. She cannot rely on him for her safety, or to tell her what life means. Adulthood, Ma appears to be saying, is about seeing these authority figures for what they are and striking out on your own, even if that means facing the apocalypse alone.