Principal characters
Adam, a violent ex-boyfriend of the protagonist in “Oranges”
Bonnie, the antagonist in “G”; a controlling frenemy who wants to hang out with a lifelong friend before she leaves New York for the West Coast
Peter, a.k.a. Petru, the narrator’s husband in “Returning”
Y, a college acquaintance of the story’s narrator in “Returning”
Whether rooted in a realistic or fully speculative setting, each of the eight stories in Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage (2022) carefully builds a world around its characters: a palatial home in Los Angeles; a dystopian United States; or the apartment of a yeti in New York City. Like Ma’s 2018 novel Severance (not the basis for the Apple TV show of the same title), Bliss Montage is interested in exploring the extraordinary circumstances people often find themselves in following seemingly ordinary occurrences, and her clear, crisp prose allows these ideas to flourish. In the collection’s opening story, “Los Angeles,” an unnamed protagonist is living in a house with her husband and son while one hundred of her ex-boyfriends live in a guest house adjacent to their comfortable accommodation. In another, “Oranges,” a woman in her thirties follows an ex-boyfriend named Adam through night-time Los Angeles, from a fancy grocery store to the apartment he is now living in. A perpetrator of domestic violence, Adam has left a path of traumatized women in his wake and the story’s protagonist is compelled to spy. The boundaries of friendship and family are explored in the story “G,” which features two young women who have taken a drug called G that allows people to disappear for a period. “Peking Duck” takes on an autobiographical tone with a story-within-a-story, while collection closer “Tomorrow” is set close enough in the near-future that things feel uncanny and strange but not altogether unidentifiable. The women at the center of each of these stories are often at a crossroads, conflicted in the decisions they must make, and not always dressed with the best tools to move forward in a healthy, safe way.
The idea that the past never really lets go, that people can never truly move beyond their attachments and choices of the past, is one of the more prevalent themes in Bliss Montage. It appears in the stories “Oranges,” “G,” and “Returning.” Though the narrators’ relationships vary from story to story, the relationships affect each protagonist in similar ways.
In “G,” two twenty-something women meet up for one last adventure before one leaves on a cross-country flight. Through flashbacks, the reader learns that their relationship has been quite unhealthy through the years, with Bonnie, the story’s antagonist, sabotaging the relationships of the unnamed narrator, slinking into bed with the narrator’s ex-boyfriend and undermining her sense of reality. The fascination with unhealthy relationships of the past is also examined in “Oranges,” which is structured as a series of violent flashbacks. The reader is left to wonder what power the narrator’s ex, Adam, has over her, as she seems to be unable to completely release his grip on her. “Returning” shows a woman in the midst of relationship crisis marked by the past, as she navigates a stalling marriage after establishing a connection with a shy and awkward man called simply “Y” she knew in college. “Returning” reflects on the past doubly as the narrator, a Chinese American woman who immigrated to the United States as a young child, and her husband, Peter, who is from a fictional European country called Garboza. The pair are set to visit Garboza as part of a delayed honeymoon for a festival called the Morning Festival, an event in which participants are buried overnight in the hopes of curing ailments. Both the narrator and Peter are writers, each successful, though to different degrees, and each have published books that are speculative in nature. As the narrator finds herself abandoned by her husband in the Garboza airport ahead of the festival, she contends with how her actions have led her to this moment and also questions who her husband is. Like many of the collection’s narrators, this one seems to take the present, and those who live in it, for granted, resulting in a loss of self-awareness and sometimes selfishness.
Bliss Montage’s centerpiece is the story “Peking Duck,” which traces a woman’s relationship with her mother, both Chinese immigrants. The story’s narrator came to the United States as a seven-year-old girl after living with her grandparents for two years following her parents’ immigration. Much focus is turned toward the narrator’s ability to assimilate and learn English, though she notes that her mother never quite learned the language and prefers to speak in Mandarin. This creates a doubling effect of sorts as the daughter and mother see their experiences quite differently but still share a similar sensibility. This story, in particular, is rooted in the realistic, which allows a terrifying sequence between the mother and a traveling salesman—at least that is what he says he is—to become almost surreal. The reader is left questioning whether the daughter, who later captures this event in a short story that is workshopped in a graduate level writing class, is unable to truly understand what her mother went through in this moment, and whose version of the story is allowed to surface.
As the collection concludes, the final story’s protagonist, a government worker in “Tomorrow,” discovers that she is longing to “return” as she goes through her first trimester of pregnancy in a world that is falling apart. In her world, the United States has further declined, with other countries now sending their plastic to be recycled there, and England is no longer a country at all. As she listens to some tourists complain about the presence of plastic on the beach in Miami, where she has traveled for vacation after telling her ex that she is pregnant with their child, she has the idea that she would like to return to China, a place she has not visited since her twenties. But, she learns that a return can be a dangerous thing, at least emotionally. Some things are familiar, some induce immediate nostalgia, and she eventually comes face to face with those feelings she had experienced in her own family she was hoping she had come to terms with. Even when a character longs to return to a known normal in Ma’s world, the bad must upset any good that comes of it.
Because of her ability to so powerfully capture a range of human experiences, Ma’s speculative stories feel just as approachable as those rooted in realism. Drawing on horror and science fiction, some of the stories retain a certain playfulness in their descriptions of the fanciful. In “Tomorrow,” the protagonist discovers that the arm of her fetus has emerged from her body well ahead of delivery, which is apparently not uncommon. In the story “Office Hours,” a magical world is accessible from behind an ancient wardrobe, and rather than feel apprehension toward it, the narrator fully embraces this ability to escape her present reality, but the reader never feels that break with reality. Rather, in these stories, as well as in “Returning” and “Yeti Lovemaking,” Ma retains a certain playfulness in her descriptions of the fanciful and takes the reader along on the adventure, asking only that they be willing to immerse themselves in each story’s world.
Bliss Montage was the recipient of glowing reviews across media outlets, receiving a starred review from Kirkus ahead of its publication. For the San Francisco Chronicle’s Datebook, critic Allison Arieff noted that much like Candace Chen, Ma’s protagonist in Severance, the protagonists in Bliss Montage respond to their “respective circumstance[s] with varying degrees of inertia,” but “none of them can summon the will to change.” Arieff concluded, “Despite friends, family, money, career advancement and other conventional markers of success, they are unable to find stillness—let alone bliss.” New York Times reviewer Lovia Gyarkye likewise observed the detachment the women of Ma’s stories employ as they navigate their worlds, stating, “The women populating these stories are not merely at the center, they are the center. As they move languorously through the world, observing and operating with a cool detachment, their questionable choices . . . fuel the narratives, and heighten their stakes.” Jennifer Schaffer-Goddard, a reviewer for the Nation, wrote, “Ma’s new story collection, Bliss Montage, slips into the space that emerges when our grasp of practical reality eases and our sense for psychedelic possibilities expands.” Schaffer-Goddard went on to praise the collection for its “prose as cool and fine as hotel linens.”
Bliss Montage was also reviewed positively by NPR and the Washington Post. NPR’s Maureen Corrigan wrote that she was “reluctant, but compelled” to read the collection after reading Severance because “Ma’s writing, in short, stays with you whether you want it to or not.” Indeed, she found that “all of the stories in Bliss Montage are haunting; none are didactic” and that Ma “writes with such authority that we readers are simply swept along.” Michele Filgate, writing for the Washington Post, praised the collection and the author’s talent: “The genius of Ma’s stories is unearthed in how she stretches the boundaries of the world while zooming in on the details that matter most.”