Severance

Aimless, meandering, sterile. This book had shocking little to say despite being convinced that it did. A stumbling attempt at the satirization of hustle culture in a world that provides little else fulfillment, every moment of this was a slog.

Candace, the child of two Chinese immigrants, works in New York city at a company that manages printing for books or something. She's not unhappy, but deeply apathetic towards her situation. An aspiring artist, she only took the job on a whim, but stuck with it for the stability, and while she's good at it, it brings her no fulfillment. She is in a situationship with a former neighbor who unexpectedly announced that he was leaving the city, and thus would be ending the relationship. With both of her parents dead, Candace truly has no one at this point, but she still doesn't have any strong emotions about it, even after realizing that she's pregnant with his child. Enter the Shen Virus, a fungal infection originating in China, slowly making it's way across the world. Non-contagious but incurable, this devastating infection turns people into semi-mindless zombies, repeating rote tasks until their death. As New York slowly becomes more and more devastated, Candace continues to truck along with work until forced to leave the city. Jump ahead, Candace is traveling with a small band of survivors led by Bob, a creepy, oddly religious guy who enforces strict rules among their group, exacting punishments as he alone sees fit. After an event that challenges his trust in her, Candace is put into a precarious position within the group, and wants nothing more than to escape, but can she find the strength to face this bleak world alone?

I don't really want to waste a lot of breath on this. This wasn't good. Despite the dystopian story, it was extremely slow. We spend an obscene amount of time following Candace as she did extremely tedious tasks like go on work trips, commute to the office, host dinner parties, and take photographs. There's very little action or time devoted to really diving into the apocalyptic aspects of the book. Honestly, that's fine with me because I'm not a huge fan of dystopian books to begin with, but the problem is that this book had nothing else to offer. It did nothing. It said nothing. But it so clearly tried to.

One could argue that this is about the ceaseless nature of corporate office work, but that wasn't fully explored or resolved. Candace didn't meaningfully change as a result of her work ethic, nor did she come to any revelations about her life despite her work ethic. The themes of cultural identity were touched upon, Candace lived her first 6 years in China, then moved to the United States to join her parents, each having different opinions of the country. She then later visited China on a work trip, briefly connecting with some of the workers over their shared identity.. but then that was it. That was the extent of the exploration of identity. She never had to reconcile her American or Chinese identities, it felt like a hanging thread of the story. You could say this is about survival or perseverance, but Candace was so detached throughout the entire book, you wouldn't be able to argue that she really worked hard to persevere at all. She simply moved through life as she pleased without any conviction or drive, even through the end of the book. The only real conflict of the story was unexplained due to the complete lack of character development of any of the characters, we had no idea who Bob really was or why he was doing anything that he was doing.

The pacing of this was bad and boring. The characters had no development or unique voices. What a disappointment. If you want to read a book just as good as this one, you should read The Memory of Animals, but if you want to read a good version of this, read Station Eleven.