Bliss Montage is Ma's first short-story collection, following on from her debut novel, Severance, published in 2018. As with her novel, characterised as an "apocalyptic office novel" in the Paris Review, describing these short stories in a single line may make them sound gimmicky, but such descriptions belie the emotional and intellectual depth of this collection.
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In the first story, "Los Angeles", the protagonist is a sort of stay-at-home girlfriend who lives with all her previous boyfriends and patiently awaits visits from her husband who only speaks in dollar signs; in "G", the protagonist takes a drug that makes you invisible; in "Yeti Lovemaking" she goes on a date with a bona fide yeti; and in "Office Hours", a version of Narnia appears in a college professor's cupboard.
In each instance, the inventions operate in different ways, whether satirising online dating or creating a metaphor for the seeming stagnation of tenured academics. Despite the outlandish realities of these stories, Ma's use of flat affect reads as deadpan humour and encourages the reader to accept the terms of the mini-worlds she creates.
The stories don't slip into moralising, in part because of the Ma's sense of humour; whether she is holding up a mirror up to the perils facing creative writers sucked into the academic industrial complex or the awful realities of race relations in contemporary America and the Asian American experience - which is particularly timely given the rise in hate crimes against Asian people since the start of the pandemic - each of the stories is infused with black humour.
The themes that cross stories and thoughtful juxtapositions also serve to make the whole greater than the parts. "Los Angeles" has references to domestic violence that ripple into the second story "Oranges", that features one character in the same name. Adam's domestic violence moves from the periphery of the first story to the centre of the second as Ma asks the reader to consider both responses to violence and responsibilities of victims in an imperfect world.
In new research published in the journal Polymers, scientists reported having found microplastics in human breast milk for the first time. No longer is our use of plastics just a question of polluting land and sea; now the effects are measurable in our own bodies. I read about this when I was halfway through Bliss Montage and it immediately made me think about her writing; what sets Ma's work apart from much contemporary fiction is that the contemporary world is not simply around her characters, it's part of them and their lives, intrinsic to their thought patterns - which is one of the reasons her writing feels so relevant and authentic.
