Really liked this one – would highly recommend.

Oh, and there’s something in there about masculinity too, from her beloved but damaged father, to her hapless lovers, to the small crew fleeing cross-country post-apocalypse whose self-appointed leader you just want to kick in the shins. As it weaves back and forth through time, the book traces her journey through the maladaptive compulsions and pointless routines of late-capitalist modernity, the international circuits of people and goods around a powerful but fading US, and a certain kind of looming matter-of-fact existential dread that doesn’t necessarily point explicitly in all of these directions in-book but that certain resonates with its real-world cousins of pervasive economic precarity, the entire year of 2020, and the one-two punch of the rising far right and the climate crisis. The main character is a young Chinese-American woman working a nondescript office job that she doesn’t particularly like but is good at, that pays just enough for her to be able to afford to live in the city. Though the climate crisis definitely lurks in the background, and a superstorm hits New York at a pivotal moment. Most important, its a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.

Though this book was published a couple of years ago, the apocalypse in question is 2020-appropriate – a pandemic, in this case a fungal infection that renders you something like a nonviolent zombie, repeatedly doing some set of ordinary tasks from your pre-infection life until you die of starvation. A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Mas Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Ranges from China to Salt Lake City to the back woods roads of the northern US, but mostly it orbits a pre-apocalyptic and apocalyptic New York City.

Severance book review