To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless.To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?
I read this at a time when my routines are ruptured, and I want to smash the systems within which I've been forced to live. I read this at a time when I am seriously considering what it means to opt out, or to start over. What's the difference between the fevered lifeless zombies infected in pandemic proportions and the zombies we are in our late-capitalist lives, our daily commutes, our pointless jobs?
Severance, by Ling Ma, is a post-apocalyptic road trip, office culture commentary, and immigrant story rolled into one, with some romance thrown in for good measure. It's also a takedown of the bullshit economy. It's about following your passion and barebones survival. It's everything a good pandemic should be.
Severance is thus also a meditation on routine — and the beauty of its banality. How can you tell between those on autopilot, and those who stick to routine on principle, for its structure and purpose?
To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless.
To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?
The word "severance" occurs four times in the novel: three times regarding payout upon termination of employment, and once in relation to the narrator's father. "It was only after having officialized his severance from China that he felt free to speak openly of his life there." It's only once you're removed from a situation that you can see it clearly.
Before the fever grips the world, Candace's boyfriend Jonathan, an aspiring writer, chooses to opt out, leave the city. Candace chooses to stay, to play the game, because she sees money as freedom. Meanwhile, the Occupy Wall Street movement takes hold.
She keeps the office running for a while, until she realizes that her role is not vital. She uses her new-found time within the structure of her office day to document the pandemic on her once-defunct photography blog.
We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn't go to brunch instead. [...]
Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful sided pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn't get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.
Once the city is empty, again Candace opts out, but only because what else is there to do. When the survivor community shows signs of rupture, she opts out of that too, driving off alone, connecting to her past and believing in her future.
This novel predates our real-life Covid pandemic and the Great Resignation. It imagines how an airborne infection might disrupt society, even when it's a gig economy and a workforce primed for quiet quitting.
I am profoundly struck by the need felt by writers (and other artists) to document, whether it be their own lives, our natural world, or our social structure, whether the minutiae or the big ideas. I am coming to see writing as curation and commentary more so than creative work. Han Kang's garden journal. From Renata Adler's Speedboat to Ed Park's memoir. The story is incidental. The story is in our bearing witness.
I remember Occupy Wall Street. It was born out of a simple call for protest published in a Canadian(!) anti-capitalist magazine in February 2011, but it was never called out as foreign interference. We, the 99%, are everywhere. But what did it accomplish? Is it even history?
This month a Russian lab technician died of pneumonic plague. Ebola has spread beyond the Democratic Republic of Congo to Kenya.
Last week it was announced that the death sentence of the man who killed thirteen people at a Texas military base would be carried out by firing squad(!) and would be publicly livestreamed. The broadcast has since been canceled, but I want the future to know that this happened. Protests initiated by Paris students over underfunded schools have spread across France; more than half a million people are demonstrating about the cost of living. A cyberattack targeted supermarket refrigeration units in France, causing mass spoilage. A robot controlled by two young men sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl. Yesterday a Montreal police officer was suspended for urinating on homeless people.
Excerpts
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 17
