The Last Employee

Candace Chen is paid to stay at her desk while the city dies. That is the whole joke, and the whole horror, of Severance.

She is a production assistant in the Bible department of a Manhattan publisher called Spectra, overseeing the overseas manufacture of elaborate editions of the Bible. When a plague begins to empty New York, her employer offers her a lucrative contract to keep coming in until a set date. She takes it. By the end of 2011 she is among the last people to leave the city.

That is one half of the book. The other half follows Candace after the collapse, when a small band of survivors, all immune to the sickness, finds her close to death in a taxi on the shoulder of a Pennsylvania highway. Their leader is Bob, a former IT worker with a taste for sermons, who is walking them towards a place he calls the Facility.

Ling Ma published the novel in 2018 with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It was her debut and it won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction. It has no connection with the Apple TV+ series of the same name, which has its own review here. The two share a title and a suspicion of the office.

The art: a satire that learned to whisper

The novel cuts between the two timelines, the office before and the road after, and lets them close in on each other. The office chapters are the best thing in it. Ma has a gift for the sentence that sounds like a shrug and lands like a slap. Candace moved from Fuzhou to Salt Lake City as a child, and the book is alert to what a workplace rewards in someone like her: reliability, quiet, a willingness to stay. She is also a photographer, and she secretly runs a blog, NY Ghost, recording the city as it empties. It is a lovely idea. The one person who looks properly at New York that year is the one nobody noticed.

The road chapters are good, if not quite as good. The survivors "stalk" abandoned houses for supplies and release the fevered people they find there. Ma writes this with a flatness that is exactly right. Nobody in the group is a hero. They are what is left of an office: a leader, a mission and a schedule.

The weakness is the third act. The Facility is a disused shopping mall in Illinois that Bob co-owns and spent much of his youth in, and once Candace is inside, the book narrows into a captivity story. Bob imprisons her, and learns she is pregnant, and her safety lasts only until the baby is born. It is tense and it works. But after the loose, slippery comedy of the first two-thirds, it feels like a thriller fitted over a satire. The ending, in which Bob, now fevered, walks his nightly route through the mall while Candace takes his keys and a car and heads for Chicago, is clean and almost too quick. A book this patient has earned a few more pages of aftermath.

The prophecy: three bets and a fungus

Severance makes four bets about the future. It wins two outright, half-wins a third, and loses the one that matters most.

The plague. A new pathogen from a Chinese city spreads along the routes of trade and travel, and within months New York is a ghost town. In the novel this is the premise. In 2020 it was a Wednesday. On 11 March the World Health Organization's director-general said COVID-19 could be characterised as a pandemic, with more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries. New York State's "PAUSE" order took effect on 22 March, and by 8 April subway ridership was down 92 per cent. The city did not die. It went quiet, which is the thing the book understood best.

The office. Here the book is both right and wrong. Candace goes on working in a building, on a contract. In the real spring of 2020 the work went on without the building. Millions of white-collar jobs moved into bedrooms and kitchens, and many never moved back: a National Bureau of Economic Research paper by Barrero, Bloom and Davis reports that working from home has stabilised at about a quarter of paid workdays, some 3.5 times the 2019 level. In the novel the routine outlasts the world. In ours the routine turned out to be portable.

The fungus. The sickness is fungal, and that is the least fanciful part. Candida auris, a multidrug-resistant yeast, is tracked by the CDC, which counted 6,304 clinical cases in the United States in 2024, though it says growth has slowed since 2022. In a 2020 viewpoint the mycologist Arturo Casadevall named it as a possible early example of warming pushing fungi past the heat barrier that stops most of them infecting mammals. About 95 per cent of fungal species, he wrote, are inhibited by human core temperatures. So a fungus can already spread among the vulnerable, and may one day do better. That is a long way from the Shen Fever, which kills everyone it infects and brings down a country.

The loop. Here the book is on its own. Shen Fever does not hunt. It sends people back through their old routines until they die, and Candace comes to suspect that nostalgia is how it spreads: one of the group falls ill after visiting her childhood home. The nearest real thing is the ant fungus Ophiocordyceps, which manipulates its host's behaviour before killing it. In ants. Nothing in the human record points to a pathogen that gets inside a habit, and we have given the claim a distant date.

The reading

Severance is a very good novel, and it deserves credit for being good before it gets credit for being right. Its plague arrived in 2020 in a form it did not describe. The sickness it did describe has not arrived. But the book was never really about the plague. It was about the people who keep showing up, and how a world can end while a to-do list stays open.

That part has aged by coming true. Candace's last day at the office describes the early 2020s better than most of the commentary written about them. The best lines in the book are not about death. They are about how little a routine asks of us, and how long it can go on after the reason has gone.