“We didn’t know how to do anything so we Googled everything.” They Googled “how to build a fire,” “how to shoot a gun,” Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. “We were brand strategists and property lawyers and human resources specialists and personal finance consultants,” she explains. Ma is satiric about the workplace, in a way that’s less snobbish than Nell Zink but just as funny and imaginative. She got her job-five years before-by sleeping with “an economist and author of You’re Not the Boss of Me: Labor Values and Work Ethic Among America’s Millennial Youth.”
The ribbon markers were made of sateen instead of silk.” Her boyfriend makes money spanking businessmen, and her roommate commutes to New Jersey every day. The book block edges boasted copper-hued spray edge, duller compared to the more expensive gilding. The cover was made of leatherlike polyurethane instead of leather. Her job is to produce a “new” edition at the cheapest price point: “In order to hit the publisher’s target cost, substitutions had been made. It’s a literary device that takes their bored, disenfranchised girls out of the market economy and greases the wheel for plots that turn on the betrayal of disenfranchised unemployed people by other unemployed people.Ĭandace Chen, the protagonist of Severance-a first-generation American, orphan, and workaholic in 2006-coordinates the production of specialty Bibles, outsourcing the labor on the cheap from an office the size of a “closet” in Manhattan. Kwon, Alexandra Kleeman, Emma Cline-are drawn to cults. It’s worth noting that the breakout female novelists of the past three years-R. The cult leader, Bob,is a “power-hungry IT specialist.” His arm is in a sling from “a botched carpal tunnel surgery.” Kmart realism has here taken on a fanatical glare, as if all the flickering bulbs in the supermarket aisle have been upgraded with halogen lighting.
Both require a certain amount of women’s work (her superiors are always men) and water-cooler talk-the transition between the genres is smooth. Ling Ma’s debut novel, Severance, toggles between a novel about work, in which its protagonist carries out soul-sucking tasks to make more and more money (coerced by the structural requirements of capitalism), and a novel about a cult, in which its protagonist joins a group of zealots (coerced by the opportunity to live in a protective, if creepy, community).
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