Severance: A Novel

Severance is the first novel by Chinese-born American author, Ling Ma. When the End comes, Candace Chen is still in New York. She is employed by publishing consulting firm, Spectra, "working" from (and living in) their building on Times Square, but most days she roams the streets taking photos for her NY Ghost blog.

The city is almost deserted; only the very old, the fevered (infected and dying from Shen Fever) and the random solitary types (like her) are left by the time she drives west in the Yellow NYC Taxi. Split from her boyfriend, and without surviving family to run to, Candace joins a small group whose self-proclaimed leader has a safe destination in mind, but who insists on some strange rituals. It's a new Beginning, but is it the Beginning Candace needs?

The narrative jumps about a bit between reminiscences of Candace's childhood in China and her adolescence (fraught with maternal conflict) in America, her time in New York, and the group's journey across the country. These different time periods are not denoted in any way, but the context usually makes it clear. Ma's version of post-Apocalyptic USA is definitely different.

Without doubt, Candance is not instantly likeable: she's a bit naïve, a bit quirky, but not necessarily nice; she's of that entitled generation that thinks nothing of calling 911 because the lift in her office building has stopped working. But, as her history is revealed, and as she gains some maturity, she grows less irritating and more appealing. Ma's own experience (born in China, raised in UItah) gives her protagonist a seal of authenticity.

Ma has a talent for descriptive prose: "When I was a kid, I named this feeling Fuzhou Nighttime Feeling. It is not a cohesive thing, this feeling, it reaches out and bludgeons everything. It is excitement tinged by despair. It is despair heightened by glee. It is partly sexual in nature though it precedes sexual knowledge. If Fuzhou Nighttime Felling were a sound, it would be early/mid-nineties R&B. if it were a flavor, it would be the ice-cold Pepsi we drink as we turn down tiny alley-ways where little kids defecate wildly. It is the feeling of drowning in a big open gutter, of crawling inside an undressed, unstanched would that has never been cauterized".

An outstanding debut novel it may be, but it loses half a star for the omission of quotation marks for speech: this is an irritating, gimmicky trend that some of today's authors seem to think sets their work, apart when all it really does is annoy the reader. It is lazy and does not enhance the reading experience, so is generally not appreciated. It will be interesting to see what Ling Ma does next.