Kaleidoscopic Structures: On Ling Ma's "Bliss Montage"

Ling Ma | Bliss Montage: Stories | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 2022 | 240 Pages

With her debut novel, Severance, Ling Ma established herself as something of a literary prophet. The zombie apocalypse novel came out to glowing reviews in 2018, nabbing the prestigious Kirkus Fiction Prize and a Whiting Award, along with seats on several best-of-the-year lists. Its reviewers hailed Ma’s incisive satirization of corporate life, marveling at her ability to capture, with wisdom and humor, a quintessential millennial paradox: one cannot experience true freedom while bound to the conditions of capitalism, nor can they experience true freedom without somehow acquiring capital. In early 2020, the book saw a resurgence in sales as the plot quickly took on a new significance: whispers of an airborne pathogen, Shen Fever, circulating in China; Shen Fever’s slow, unstoppable creep across borders and around the globe; anxious New Yorkers handing out N-95 masks in office buildings; once-bustling Manhattan roadways growing eerily quiet and empty of pedestrians. 

Ma’s latest book is Bliss Montage, a collection of eight oddball short stories that put a surreal twist on run-of-the-mill contemporary experiences: two childhood friends grow apart in adulthood, a woman has trouble letting go of an abusive relationship, a couple in a rough patch goes on a vacation. Ma takes these mundane episodes and turns them into dreamscapes of subtly fractured logic and absurd literalism. The narrator of the opening story, “Los Angeles,” lives with her husband, children, and 100 ex-boyfriends, whom she carts around in a Porsche 911 Turbo S “as if it were a clown car.” In “G,” two women take a drug that makes them invisible. The narrator of “Yeti Lovemaking” goes home with a man she meets in a wine bar, only to discover that he is, in fact, a mythical, snow-dwelling ape. “What he did was, he gave me a glass of water,” she writes. “And by the time I finished it, his human suit lay crumpled on the floor, cleaved in two by a zipper seam, to reveal a shiny, sweat-dampened abominable snowman.”

In tone, the stories bear pleasant resemblance to Severance, with their wry humor and cultural savvy. Common themes crop up, too. There are characters, like Severance’s discouraged protagonist Candace, who grapple with the ends of relationships or endure soul-curdling jobs. Many characters are also—like both Candace and Ma herself—first-generation Chinese immigrants who move to the U.S. as children. Ma has a knack for capturing the psychological realities of immigration and making vivid the feeling of belonging, but not quite, to two separate homes. 

For all their similarities, though, Bliss Montage covers new ground, playing with kaleidoscopic structures and taking a more studied, self-reflective posture. Take “Peking Duck,” for example, a story that insists on being read as autobiographical fiction while, at the same time, parsing the ethics of fictionalizing biography. The story hinges on a scene from the narrator’s childhood, which takes place after she moves from China to Utah. (Ma also spent time in Utah as a child, after emigrating from the Fujian province.) The scene, mentioned at first only in passing, and then with increasing detail, involves the narrator’s immigrant mother, who worked as a nanny during her first years in the U.S. The narrator, a short story writer who winds up in an MFA program (Ma also received an MFA), fictionalizes the scene for a workshop. Years later, the story winds up in the narrator’s soon-to-be-published short story collection. (Its cover image is a bowl of persimmons, which calls to mind the cellophane-wrapped oranges that don the cover of the U.S. printing of Bliss Montage.) 

This brand of explicit autofiction is fashionable among the buzzy women writers of Ma’s milieu: Lauren Oyler, Sally Rooney, and Patricia Lockwood all come to mind. And like these writers, who are smart readers and interested in literary form, Ma has a sometimes exaggerated impulse to anticipate criticism and bake it into the prose itself. In another scene from “Peking Duck,” workshop students discuss stories like the narrator’s, in which the author takes a real-life episode from someone else’s life, then distorts and reconstructs it as fiction. One student “likens this device to a game of telephone,” while another asks, “Can the writer, who’s retelling another’s story, really assume authorship?” By the time we reach the conclusion of “Peking Duck,” and we finally get to read the short story, there’s hardly any reason to formulate our own questions or critiques. The work has already been done for us. 

The self-referentiality of these stories is fun, but it doesn’t come without its pitfalls. All the defensive posturing can begin to feel burdensome. In “Office Hours,” protagonist Marie is a university professor who leads a class discussion on Zwigoff’s 2001 film, Ghost World. “I didn’t get the ending. I mean, I like that it’s kind of open-ended, but it feels like a cop-out,” remarks one of Marie’s students, Zach. “Enid just gets on this special bus and goes where?” If Zach believes that Zwigoff is copping out with this iconic final scene, he could certainly hurl the same accusation at Ma. Every story in Bliss Montage can reasonably be described as “open-ended,” with characters' feelings left strikingly ambiguous, or their next move unclear. But Ma is not content to leave it there without first mounting a defense against the kind of dismissive attitude that would render her stories trite. “Well, the ending seems to serve as a refutation of some kind,” Marie responds, “with Enid opting out of the town on this mysterious bus. One way to approach this is to ask: What is Ghost World trying to refute? Are there specific scenes that suggest an answer?” As the professor tries to help her students understand the film, we see Ma guiding her readers toward a more fruitful understanding of “Office Hours.”

The story begins with an unnamed college student facing the enormity of her future. “On the other side of graduation was her actual life,” writes Ma, “the slow narrowing of possibilities that would catch her and freeze her in a vocation, a relationship, a life.” When we meet this character again years later, she has a name, Marie. (Her initial namelessness—suggestive of the fluid nature of identity in youth—grates against the stasis she finds herself in as an adult.) Despite her best efforts, she’s wound up disgruntled, stifled by irksome coworkers, the politics of academia, the impossibility of shifting course. “It would be a stunningly self-defeating move,” she thinks as she considers leaving her job. “What would she do after this? What other career could she have?” 

With all this in mind, the ending of this story feels less open-ended; like less of a “cop-out.” Marie’s final actions adopt a certain logic. In the end, she finds a way to reject linear time, that “slow narrowing of possibilities” that before kept her miserable and stuck. By adopting Professor Marie’s critical framework to read the story in question, one can wrest some pretty sober ideas out of an otherwise cooky tale. But readers may not need that much guidance. A touch of analysis within stories can encourage more active reading, but too much can feel condescending. 

The winking asides in Bliss Montage are disappointing, but the collection is such a display of artisanship that it’s hard to write it off for a few lapses into trendiness. The stories adhere to a thoughtful arc, taking on an almost classical structure—a hero’s journey. We begin with a call to adventure (“Los Angeles” ends with a chase scene as a character moves from ruminative stasis to purposeful action) and end with a return (“Tomorrow” concludes with a narrator on board a plane, returning home after a months-long trip). At about the midway point, in “Returning,” there is even a trip to the underworld, as a character is buried alive and pulled from the earth again. 

In the collection’s acknowledgements, Ma attributes the book’s title to a word supposedly coined in film historian Jeanine Basinger’s 1993 book, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960. It’s no coincidence, I suspect, that two of Ma’s stories center around film historians, or that Basinger’s definition of a “woman’s film” could apply, bullet for bullet, to the entire collection. “The stories were a kind of protective coloring… it was a safe way to lift the restrictions, because the out-of-control plots were just too, too bizarre.” Basinger’s “Bliss Montage,” which she also calls the “Happy Interlude,” is a device that allows filmmakers to reveal the fleeting, compromised state of a woman’s happiness. “Its visual presentation, as a montage, finds the cinematic equivalent of its own meaning: the rapid and brief passage of time in which a woman can be happy.”

The characters of Bliss Montage are not glamorous stars of Old Hollywood, nor are they, even briefly, happy. Rather, they are all caught in the same fractured psychological state of being between two worlds: fantasy and reality, freedom and entrapment, the country they were born in and the one they live in now. If Bassinger’s “Bliss Montage'' is meant to signify the fragile, ephemeral nature of woman’s happiness, perhaps Ma’sis meant to signify something else—something in the feminine spirit that is neither fragile nor ephemeral, but enduring and a little mysterious.