Candace escapes and calls 911 to inform them of the dangerous elevator. One of those last mornings, the elevator stops on the way to her office suite on the 32 nd floor, and for a panicky moment she wonders if it will fall, if anyone is watching the security camera, if there’s anyone left to respond to the emergency-call button. Even though all of her coworkers have either become “fevered” or fled the city.

Even though there is no further work to be done. So now in these waning moments, Jonathan long gone, Candace continues to show up at her office in a midtown high rise. She has argued about this job with Jonathan: He wants to leave the city and be a free spirit, but she finds more freedom in the security of waged work.

In the last third or so of the book’s “End” storyline in New York City, Candace is increasingly fixated on her job at a publishing company. They need to save face.”īut that YA voice gives way to some serious meditations on work - meditations that are as timely in our pandemic moment as the plot itself. Maybe they don’t want to incite mass panic, but I’ll bet it’s also because they don’t want foreign investors to pull out of their economy.

Jonathan, erstwhile lover of our protagonist Candace Chen, conjectures that it’s worse in China than reported: “The state media in China controls the optics of this, so we don’t know the real statistics. Rumors swirl about the origins and spread of Shen Fever. Its final-stage symptoms are that the “fevered” repeat routines and habits to the exclusion of their own sustenance - zombielike, but not in a menacing way, horrifying, but only for those of us troubled by existentialism and whatnot.

A virus has emerged from southeast China and gradually becomes a devastating pandemic. Published in 2018, its resemblance to our times is uncanny. So begins, more or less, Ling Ma’s debut novel, “Severance.” It’s tempting to fixate on the prescience of this dystopian novel. A subsequent email will inform them that it is company policy to wear N95 masks in the office. The CEO tells the staffers, “we take your health very seriously” and assures them that “we are working in accordance with the New York State Department of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” As the meeting concludes, the staffers circulate a “Shen Fever FAQ” page regarding the symptoms of a new epidemic - “Shen Fever,” they call it, for its association with Shenzhen, China. The entire office is gathered together for an announcement from management regarding new workplace protocols.

Severance novel