This novel is ostensibly about a zombie apocalypse but on reading it’s actually anything but. The book has a surprisingly vast thematic range given its size (globalism! mother-daughter relationships! immigration! religion!) but I think it revolves around around Candace’s disaffection. The parallel between Shen Fever and her inability to stop going to work and to leave New York City are obvious. As Ling Ma writes in an interview, Shen Fever really just accelerates what we already do: live our lives in mindless repetition. The fact that Shen Fever seems to be correlated (as with the cases of Ashley and Bob) with nostalgia bolsters this. The idea that we will repeat ourselves to death also strongly resonates with Ross Douthat’s decadence thesis.
Candace’s mindlessness is strongly tied to her working a job that she does not care for. That the object of her labor is the Bible, commodified into a bewildering number of iterations each catered to a specific demographic, is redolent of the Marxist criticism that under capitalism “every solid melts into air,” including and especially anything that smacks of holiness. But the book’s relationship to religion is more complicated than just sadness at its debasement. A church helped her immigrant parents find community in an alien Utah; yet Bob’s religiousness is part and parcel of the mindless obedience that he fosters in the post-apocalyptic group.
Severance reminds me strongly of Ottessa Moshfegh’s work featuring lonely women, particularly Eileen specifically the ending, with both Candace and Eileen escaping to a city by car) and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, albeit without Moshfegh’s heightened, ostentatious sense of misery. Both Candace and the unnamed narrator of Rest and Relaxation (who would be clearly one of the Art Girls that Candace finds herself in contrast to) find New York City not exciting and invigorating but rather as a shiny backdrop to their meaningless jobs and muted relationships with men.