Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
Bliss Montage is a study in difficult endings. It’s Ling Ma’s second book, after her much-lauded debut novel Severance, which itself narrated an ending of apocalyptic proportions. Here, though, the endings are the tiny, unreal crunch points of the everyday. Each one of her eight stories ends (or doesn’t end) in the middle of things, formally improper. They are plot-rich, well-versed in the force of convention and the beats of spec fic – it’s just that they end before we figure anything out. We follow them so far along each journey, our hands held by smooth prose, and then we are ejected, with nothing but a mysterious symbol or epigrammatic slice of dialogue. The story disappears through our fingers at the moment of its completion, like the soil brushed away from Petru’s face in “Returning.”
The final moment of “Yeti Lovemaking,” for example, is the narrator taking a call from her ex (addressed in the second person, as if he is the one being taught about yetis):
Your voice got soft. It sprouted nightshade. “Listen,” you said. “Don’t hang up. Just listen.” (86)
This doesn’t seem to have much to do with the literal content of the story, which is an otherworldly fantasy of an actual sexual encounter with a yeti – Ma wryly cuckolding the mundane, perhaps. It’s the kind of thing a young George R. R. Martin could write, a 60s magazine parody, all plot and pulp. This plot becomes an object lesson for modern romance. Intimacy individuates the voice, whose shape can only be communicated in a series of ambitious metaphors. We are listening for the sound that will bring us back together.
In that final paragraph, the narrator switches between a cliched description – the voice becomes ‘soft’ – and an extremely unfamiliar one – the voice ‘sprouts nightshade’ – giving us a figure for the collection as a whole: the familiar beside the absurd, the functional plot and the fantastical debarking. What will it take for those two ragged halves to cleave together?
Ma’s classroom scenes present more than one opportunity for the text to reflect on the studied impropriety of the endings:
Abby interjected: “But that’s the fantasy, right? That there is an escape, there is a way out of …” She trailed off, then restarted. “The movie doesn’t show you the answers. The ending simply opts out. It’s an aversion.” (155)
Abby seems to be giving us a real truth about form, although the text itself, in a Nabokovian twist, gently mocks her by making her say ‘aversion’ when she presumably means ‘evasion.’ But perhaps we are averse to listening.
The narrator of “Peking Duck” is troubled by this too, when it comes to finding stories for her daughter:
I tried to make up stories, simple fables with a moral lesson. Except when we came to the end, my mind would go blank. What’s the lesson here supposed to be? (192)
Moments like this make me think of David Foster Wallace’s first short story collection, Girl With Curious Hair (1989), whose concluding novella-length story is similarly populated with eager students first permitted some genuinely piercing insight into why we’re all here reading and writing this stuff and, a moment later, some laughable misfire or undergraduate faux pas. Ma, in the contemporary moment, has different concerns to the late postmodernists – Bliss Montage is unflinchingly organised around the afterlife of domestic violence and the immigrant experience, for example – but she, too, is trying to dig her way out of something (the MFA style? The pulping of the apocalypse?) which is beginning to run its course. Abby can’t specify what we want to find our way out of, which might be a weakness of the text – Wallace doesn’t hesitate to at least partly specify that the enemy is empire and the multinational’s advertising department – although, to her (and Abby’s) credit, I am sure we would all have groaned had she just said “capitalism.”
People talk about the dreamlike quality of this collection. Ma herself has reported that the ideas were developed out of dream snippets. But the collection is much neater than dreaming. My favourite moment, in “Peking Duck,” concerns the second-generation narrator’s linguistic inheritance from her mother:
Despite this, her imperfect, broken English serves as a scaffolding for my English. (173)
This is the story that quotes, in its entirety, one of Lydia Davis’ micro-short stories, about the tale of the second-language learner who reports his wife’s experience with Peking duck as the happiest moment of his life. The narrator, who speaks to us in the perfect prose we’ve come to love and expect from contemporary literary fiction, lays out the labour of that prose’s assembly and the complex inheritance that made it possible. The montage: this story shows us the generation of something beautifully whole out of a series of melancholic partials.
My mother points outside. Deer. Tree. Teeth. Eats.
I repeat the words, then put them in sentence order: Deer eats tree with teeth. (172)
Language itself is creepy, traumatised and incomplete. Ling Ma shows you what you have to wrench back together to get this kind of crafted smoothness. The inconclusive endings ring out with a threat and an instruction. I like it a lot, not for its bliss, but for its montage. There’s something about the way things end.
In between making and breaking spreadsheets, George Cox writes about I. A. Richards and literary theory. He has lived and studied on the land of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin nation since 2013. Find him on Twitter @george_r_t_c