Nostalgia and the End of the World

Review of Ling Ma’s Severance (USA: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018)
By Diana Lu

It is hard to discuss Severance without addressing Ma’s eerily prophetic vision of 2020’s COVID-19 outbreak. Reading Severance at the start of this year had me doing a double take all the way back to the publishing page, to discover that Ma had actually published her book about a global pandemic originating in China two whole years ago. However, while Ma’s Severance is startlingly prescient in some ways, her vision of the apocalypse does differ distinctively from the pandemic currently encompassing the globe. Severance chronicles the decline and collapse of society due to Shen Fever, a disease which causes individuals to lose sentience and carry out repetitive activities based on muscle memory, to essentially become zombies, till they eventually waste away and die. The novel begins with the end of civilization (something COVID-19 has thankfully not achieved yet), positioning the apocalypse as the logical conclusion of capitalism’s global dominance.

Candace is an unlikely hero for an apocalyptic novel. An ordinary New York office worker involved in the business of publishing bibles hardly seems an exciting protagonist. However, her very ordinariness is what affords Severance the ability to critique the inner workings of the capitalist machine from the perspective of a compliant subject. Early in the novel, a client calls Candace, upset that their order for the Gemstone Bible is incomplete due to a crackdown on the gemstone cutting industry. Even after learning that workers are dying of lung disease due to industry-wide unsafe labor practices, the client refuses to compromise and threatens to take their business elsewhere if Candace cannot find a new gemstone supplier. Candace is understandably angered and upset, but still proceeds to successfully procure the gemstones. This acceptance of human suffering for profit is again repeated (this time on a much more massive scale) when the Shen Fever outbreak escalates. Despite evidence suggesting that the virus is spread by consumer goods, governments and corporations downplay the severity of the outbreak to keep the economy going. When Candace’s office is first informed about the pandemic, corporate language is deployed to deflect employee concerns in favor of preserving the more profitable status quo:

Lane followed up with another question. We handle lots of prototypes and other samples shipped from our suppliers in China, she said. So how do we make sure we’re not coming in contact with the fungus?

Carole cleared her throat. The New York State Department of Health has not mandated work restrictions. But, as you know, your health is our first priority, and the company is taking precautions. Can I ask the interns to come around? We are distributing personal-care kits to every employee.

Environmentalists have long criticized capitalism as an unsustainable system, fundamentally opposed to the survival of humanity and our environment. What goes unmentioned in Severance is the direct link between environmental destruction and viral pandemics. Because of the capitalist-led destruction of their natural habitats, wild animals that have served as neutral hosts for viruses for millennia are forced to seek new habitation in areas populated by humans to devastating effect. However, as Severance points out, environmental action is often not pursued under capitalist systems with urgency unless there are profits to be made. Candace’s company continues its work as normal. Tourists from poorer European nations take advantage of cheaper flights to visit New York. Even New York Fashion Week continues, albeit scaled down, with fashion houses trotting models down the runway in designer masks.

After Candace’s boss fires her with a hefty severance package, she decides to stay in her New York office and takes photographs of the collapsing city for her revived photograph blog, the NY Ghost. Despite her clear misgivings about the capitalist system and her complicit role in it, Candace is only spurred into leaving when she accidentally locks herself out of her office building (coincidentally on the exact day her contract ends). She explains her inertia in this manner when she rejects her boyfriend Jonathan’s appeal to leave her job and join him on a boat to Puget Sound: 

You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live… and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles… peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices… In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.

Candace might distrust capitalism, but she does not view “opting out” as an actual possibility. Her resolve to stay and accept the severance deal is strengthened when she discovers she is pregnant (something she withholds from Jonathan).

The narrative alternates between two timelines, Candace’s life before the End, and after, when she is picked up by a band of survivors and their leader, Bob. The survivors are making their way to the Facility, a two-storey building supposedly stocked with everything they could need. On the way there, Candace becomes increasingly alienated by Bob’s beliefs and actions. Matters come to a head when he murders two members of the group, one Fevered and the other (allegedly) protecting her. Candace plans to escape, but Bob discovers both her plan and her pregnancy, and imprisons her within a L’Occitane in the Facility, which turns out to be a mall he co-owns.

Bob is plainly written as a regressive figure, despite his own proclamation that, with the breakdown of society, they are now “more free to live in the present, and… to envision [their] future.” He leads the group on “stalks,” looting and raiding homes, businesses, and other buildings for inventory. His actions reproduce the capitalist consumerist model in the absence of a functioning global economy by hoarding items of value as opposed to finding ways to sustainably produce what they need. Moreover, Bob is also heavily religious, believing that they have been divinely selected to survive, in a parallel to America’s early white settlers and Puritans.

Severance, for the most part, portrays nostalgia as the cause of humanity’s downfall. Midway through the novel, Candace theorizes that since Shen Fever is spread by spores that have crept across the world, everyone alive has already been exposed. This theory is supported by how symptoms appear to manifest only after a person engages in an act of remembrance. The symptoms themselves support the theory—the Fevered repeat actions based on muscle memory. Candace, in contrast to her fellow survivors, is able to survive because of her lack of nostalgia. While she does experience visions of her deceased mother who spurs on her escape, her visions are based on her imagination and are markedly unreal. These conversations with the dead inject levity into the narrative, such as when Candance remarks on her mother’s sudden command of English and her mother retorts:

Well, I can’t communicate with you in your terrible Chinese, she deadpans. Anyway. She gets up. Be careful.

Severance therefore appears to argue that to survive, one has to disregard the past and move forward. It is regrettable that the novel does not show what this “forward” might look like, as the novel ends with her escape, but not with new modes of existence. Furthermore, although Ma’s novel aptly criticizes nostalgia as a factor inhibiting action and change, I cannot help but take issue with how Severance disregards modes of sustainable living that have existed for centuries before (and after) the imposition of capitalism on indigenous communities. Historically indigenous people of every colonized land have been subject to genocide, historical erasure, and forced assimilation into the capitalist model. Excluding such demographics completely from the narrative feels like a further erasure of geniune historical alternatives.

The novel even mirrors white settler narratives. When Candace is in a silent New York, she imagines the future without humanity, which she then thinks should actually be the past: 

…the pine-and hickory-forested island that the Dutch first glimpsed upon arriving, populated with black bears and wolves, foxes and weasels, bobcats and mountain lions, ducks and geese in every stream. Initial European explorers had viewed Manhattan as paradise. Here I would lead a horse to drink.

This Edenic narrative has long been used, of course, to disguise and justify the violent genocide of indigenous peoples. The land is represented as untamed, uninhabited nature, a blank slate for the white settler to materialize and manifest their desires.

Severance also follows in the footsteps of the white settler narrative to enforce an artificially blank slate by excluding non-human life from the narrative. Although Shen Fever does not affect wildlife, the narrative is conspicuously bare of any animal life, aside from old carriage horses and rats (which really don’t need a pandemic to help them rule New York) in Central Park and Times Square. There are no wildlife encounters even when the survivors camp in forested areas. There are no pets, farm animals, wild animals, predators, to crowd the empty landscape that Ma wants us to see in humanity’s absence. While the exclusion does simplify the narrative, it appears to result in yet more erasure, this time of non-human life, in a rather anthropocentric take on the eco-apocalypse.

In addition, the choice not to comment on class in an anti-capitalist novel feels jarring. The novel never once engages with any individual marginalized by capitalism. Although Jonathan, Candace’s boyfriend, criticizes and opts out of capitalism by retreating on a boat to Puget Sound, as a white man he has the privilege of choice in the matter. And although Candace is Asian-American, her race never makes her a target, in an instance where real life is more horrendous than the author can imagine (even in a zombie apocalypse!). It is important to note too that indigenous peoples are among the most marginalized demographics, and individuals from these groups are always hit the hardest by global health and environmental crises. In America, for example, the community with the highest per-capita COVID-19 cases is Navajo Nation. Although excluding marginalized demographics does simplify a narrative, it is perhaps an oversimplification to separate class issues from environmental ones so cleanly.

Nonetheless, Severance is an important and thoughtfully written novel that can push us to  think more critically about capitalism’s glaring shortcomings by adopting the relatable perspective of an office drone with a mundane job. The fact that it accurately extrapolated the capitalist response to human tragedy is also no insignificant feat, and it will hopefully lead more of us to recognize the fundamental flaws of the system we live under in the age of the climate crisis. And just as the word “apocalypse” does not mean the end but the unveiling of the truth, Ma has certainly given the reader plenty of truth to chew on by the close of the novel.


Diana Lu is a researcher of English Literature at NTU, specializing in world literature and the study of global cities. She has presented at the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature’s 2019 Conference and the International Conference of Undergraduate Research 2018. She has also helped to organize NTU English’s Global Cities 2020 Conference.