Bliss Montage by Ling Ma — compromised pleasure

Ling Ma’s Kirkus Prize-winning debut, Severance, was a literary take on the zombie apocalypse novel. Published in 2018, it was eerily prescient, featuring a deadly disease originating in China that wipes out the population.

Having already written a pandemic novel, Ma found herself during the pandemic producing “surreal, introspective, and oddly shaped” stories instead, some of which have appeared in publications such as Granta, The Atlantic and The New Yorker. “It is in the most surreal situations that a person feels the most present, the closest to reality,” muses one of her characters.

Like Severance, the bulk of the eight short stories collected in Bliss Montage have a fantastical twist. In “Tomorrow”, a baby’s arm protrudes from a pregnant woman’s vagina — a situation that while “not ideal”, her doctor admits, is “relatively safe for the baby”. “Office Hours” revolves around a Narnia-esque portal on the wall of a university office. “Yeti Lovemaking” offers a how-to on inter-species intercourse, which is “difficult and painful at first, but easy once you’ve done it more than 30 times. Then it’s like riding a bike.”

In “Los Angeles”, a woman shares a mansion with her husband, children and 100 ex-boyfriends. The cute conceit, in which she brings the boyfriends to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and juice bars en masse, takes a sharp turn when one of the exes is revealed to have been physically abusive. It’s a storyline picked up in “Oranges”, in which the narrator is contacted by an ex-boyfriend’s former partner who is pressing charges for domestic battery — news she finds “both revelatory and unsurprising”. Like all of Ma’s narrators, her delivery is deadpan; the cool tone renders the violence recounted all the more chilling.

Among Ma’s recurrent themes are alienation and immigration. Like the author, many of her protagonists were born in China and emigrated to the US as children. The narrator of “Returning” meets her husband at a literary festival, where they’re both on a panel of immigrant authors, although their novels are “about vastly different topics”. In “G”, two young Asian-American women take a recreational drug that makes users invisible as well as euphoric. One of the women is drawn to the self-erasure that G affords: “It lifts the tiny anvil of self-consciousness. You can go anywhere, unimpeded by the microaggressions of strangers.” Her friend, meanwhile, uses the cloak of invisibility to more sinister ends.

The cover image of Bliss Montage, depicting oranges behind cellophane, suggests gratification just beyond reach. The title, we learn in Ma’s acknowledgments, comes from a term coined by film historian Jeanine Basinger. A “bliss montage”, Basinger writes, is a visual depiction of a heroine’s brief interlude of happiness in old Hollywood films — “maybe two minutes’ running time of joy” before the leading man “lets her down or something really awful happens”.

Throughout the collection, Ma deftly captures the mood of what she has referred to as “compromised pleasure”. The portal in “Office Hours” is used not for mythic adventures but to sneak cigarettes, as smoking is no longer allowed in campus buildings. In “Returning”, an affair is more about co-presence than passion. Nested within “Peking Duck” is the recollection of a nanny, who says her happiest moment was when she learned she was having a girl. “I thought, Now I will be understood.” And yet she finds that her Americanised daughter does not understand her.

Not all of the stories in Bliss Montage are fully achieved; a few struggle to evolve past their premise. “Yeti Lovemaking”, for one, brings to mind Rachel Ingalls’ cult classic 1982 novella Mrs Caliban, in which a housewife has a love affair with an amphibious sea creature, while lacking Ingalls’ stakes of the frogman being hunted by the authorities. But as an observer who immigrated as a child, Ma offers an astute insider-outsider perspective and a sharp eye for detail.

With an affinity for ambiguous endings, Ma does not always offer readers a resolution. In a self-referential wink, “Office Hours” has a student protesting against the open-ended conclusion of a film. “It feels like a cop-out,” he says. It may be less of a cop-out than an opt-out, his teacher suggests, asking that he consider what the film is trying to refute. Ma’s fiction puts us in dystopian-yet-familiar situations that illuminate absurdities. Just as Severance used zombies in shopping malls to critique consumerism and office culture, these stories tweak the everyday to allow us to question the mirages scaffolding our reality.

Bliss Montage: Stories by Ling Ma, Text Publishing Company £10.99, 240 pages

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