Ma’s sleek, light prose offers an entertaining version of New York young professional culture while hewing close to the immigrant tale, intercutting scenes of Chinese factory visits for work and intimate shark fin soup dinner parties. By recasting a specific Asian American history into a post-apocalyptic nightmare of capitalist consumerism, Severance radically eschews historical perspective for the phantasmal uncertainty of a speculated future, demonstrating the ability of minority writing to destabilize and question our conceptions of the ordinary. Historical reference is notably absent the novel takes place in what seems to be present-day Manhattan, or a not-so-distant tomorrow. Everything, from Candace’s aspirations to be like the chic Art Girls at her office to her sex life, is discussed in wry, candid detail, belying the seriousness of the book’s themes. Kingston and Ng use elements such as folkloric talk-story to circumvent historic restrictions on women’s ability to express themselves, but Severance encounters no such blockade. As an author of Asian descent, her decision to write speculative fiction is a dramatic departure from more traditionally bent predecessors in the Chinese immigrant tale, such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Fae Myenne Ng. Ma, who teaches fiction writing as Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Department of Creative Writing at UChicago, received the 2018 Kirkus Prize for her debut.

In her genre-bending, dystopian immigrant novel Severance, author Ling Ma (AB’05) introduces us to Candace Chen, a self-conscious New Yorker millennial, as she beats the odds in surviving a global epidemic of Shen Fever, a wasting illness that reduces its victims to soulless vessels forced to mechanically cycle through their last acts until their bodies disintegrate.

By Danielle Shi, candidate for Masters in the Humanities, MAPH program

Severance ling ma review