I wonder what it was like to read this book pre-COVID. Because I can tell you that reading it now, six years after COVID hit, it’s not as satirical as perhaps the author intended. In Severance, the deadly virus definitively originates in China and makes sort-of zombies (not the brain-eating kind) from the infected. Other than that difference, this book is spookily prescient. So much so that I had to keep re-checking the original publication date, but, yeah, Severance was first published in August of 2018.
And yeah, prescient as hell. I think maybe some of it is just basic pandemic preparation because there are N-95 masks, and PPE, and travel bans. And everyone is sent to work from home except for some workers, not called essential workers, but basically essential workers. But it’s not just the pandemic, it’s also the foresight regarding exploding rents, the disappearing middle class, and shell companies buying up all of the real estate. Oh, and the fact that Manhattan is sinking. Literally.
Again, maybe all of that is just obvious to an intelligent person researching and writing in what I’m guessing is the early 2010s. While the author doesn’t specify the year, the novel seems to be set in maybe 2011/2012? Obama is still President and Occupy Wall Street happens, pandemic be damned. There is also a hurricane that, based on the damage described, might have been Sandy, but is re-named Mathilde.
Either way, Ling Ma’s end-of-the world seems pretty perceptive to me, in way that actually made me very uncomfortable. It’s still a good book, even if it’s not the book the blurbs promise. What it is, is a very smart, sometimes funny, look at the immigrant experience, capitalism, globalism, city-life and the possible end of it all. It’s just that, having recently experienced the COVID pandemic and currently experiencing the continued economic and political fallout, this book definitely hit different for me.
