Severance by Ling Ma (Picador) ~Janet Brown

"The end begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary...like a West Nile thing." By the time masks and gloves are doled out, it's already too late. What's classified as an outbreak is blooming into a pandemic. Before the year's up, there's no answer at the suicide hotline and the ones who haven't succumbed to Shen fever feel ashamed of being survivors.

Candace works for a company that packages books, guiding publishing projects through overseas production. She hoped to work with art books but instead she handles "the bestseller of the year, every year." She oversees different editions of the Bible, the ones that will become sumptuous family heirlooms, the ones that come with a cheap gemstone on a chain for the teenage market. Her chosen New York life is one of "insulated enjoyment," not quite part of what she sees, with a laugh that's "a social liability." 

Still she, seen as "capable but fragile" is chosen to stay in the office with a sizable pay increase, when everyone else begins to shelter in place. She watches New York become a ghost town, taking photographs of an empty city until the day she leaves the office and realizes she's locked herself out. 

She's found, unconscious and dehydrated, alone in a Yellow Cab, by a group of disparate people, headed by a short, stout man who once worked in IT. Bob claims he owns a building, somewhere near Chicago, where they all can take shelter. When he discovers that Candace is pregnant, she becomes an integral part of his tribe.

Candace has no family. She came from Suzhou when she was six when her parents had made enough money to send for her. When they died in an automobile accident after she became an adult, her only blood ties are people she barely remembers, voices over a phone line, voices that have gone silent. Now, in this new group, she's still the outsider.

Severance suffers under two handicaps. One is a confusion with an Apple drama that began streaming under the same name and became wildly popular. And it had the bad fortune of being seen as a  Covid novel, piggybacking on that time of death and terror, a time that nobody cares to relive.

However Ling Ma's debut novel was published two years before Covid changed the world. Even if she's an extraordinarily swift writer, she created this book at least four years before the most recent pandemic, drawing upon a speculative theme based on SARS. Because of this, she approaches the idea of an America decimated by unstoppable illness with gallows humor and emotional distance. Her few scenes of horror and her portrayal of a desolate New York are works of imagination. 

Severance is another victim of Covid, overlooked and misunderstood. Within the framework of a horror novel, it explores freedom, its limits and meaning. 

"When you wake up in a fictitious world, your only frame of reference is fiction." Perhaps after being immersed in a fictitious world for far too long, it's only natural that we would reject the frame of reference that Ling Ma created long before her fiction became real. And that's a shame.