Ms. Hen reviews Severance

Severance

Ling Ma

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2018

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because she saw the author at the Pen Hemingway Awards Ceremony where she won a runner-up for SEVERANCE. She heard the author read from the novel, and she became fascinated with the post-apocalyptic story of a woman surviving the fever outbreak in New York by herself.

This novel is about a young Chinese American woman who lives in New York. The story is told in flashbacks. Candace Chen moves to New York after college and for the summer afterwards, wanders the streets of the city taking photographs. She starts working at a publishing company, and begins a relationship with Jonathan, a young man who dissociates himself from materialistic culture. The novel is satire, and it’s funny in places when the character talks about all the possessions she has and the things she wants, like expensive facial cleansers and moisturizers.

A fever wipes out most of the country and Candace drives out of the city. She is found by a group of people who are headed toward the Midwest to a place called the Facility, where everything they need will be available. Nobody knows what the Facility is until they get there.

Candace is a woman who has been swept along the tide of her life: she works at a job she doesn’t like producing Bibles, she finds herself with a man who is eccentric, and she gets picked up by a group of people who think they are saving the world. But she has a strong will that she inherited from her mother, a Chinese immigrant, who wanted the best for her only child. A section of this novel describes Candace’s parents’ story. Her father was a hard-working man, who got hit by a car and died too young.

Ms. Hen thinks this is a unique novel about a woman’s struggle to survive a world catastrophe. Ms. Hen doesn’t know what will ultimately happen to this character, but she realizes that sometimes a reader does not have to know everything. Ms. Hen enjoys science fiction, especially by women about women, because for a long time the genre has been dominated by men.

There are several chickens in this novel, which pleased Ms. Hen. Ms. Hen’s favorite part that mentioned chicken was when Candace’s father and she passed the U.S. citizenship test and went out to eat, “The afternoon my father and I passed our citizenship test together, he took us to the KFC across the street and ordered a deluxe combo of fried chicken with all the sides. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but because he never treated himself, I ate a few pieces along side him, feigning a festive, abundant appetite.” Her father explained to her that when he was young meat was scarce and he only got to eat it during the New Year’s celebration. Ms. Hen thinks this is sweet and full of pathos, and she is happy that the characters celebrated becoming American by eating fried chicken.

Ms. Hen loved this novel. It’s starkly different from what she has been reading lately. She has read a few novels about the Asian immigrant experience, one she chose not to write about. She read this novel quickly because she thirsted to know what happened next. She would recommend it to anyone to wants to be provoked, and to be guided to view our society with a new lens.