The stories themselves seemingly could not exist in the same world as each other, with each one hosting an all-consuming nightmare that must be the only one haunting the narrator’s world, because life would otherwise seem unlivable.
While not entirely cohesive, “Bliss Montage” is a loosely-connected series of allegories stolen from real-world anxieties. Though “Severance” may have set this as the standard for Ling Ma’s writing, “Bliss Montage” has completely mastered it. And though each narrator is distinct in the plots they recount, they share the same feeling of anxiously peering through a cracked window, searching for something to salvage in all the rubbish of their lives. Importantly, this successful execution is somehow amplified in “Bliss Montage,” in which each narrator has nearly the same disembodied, borderline claustrophobic voice. This was achieved through Ling Ma’s jaded, exhausted and bored characterizations of women living in exaggerated modern landscapes.
Candace, the protagonist of “Severance,” embodied the disassociated-woman trend in contemporary literature, while equally satirizing it. It would be a disservice to Ling Ma and the merit of “Bliss Montage” to live in the shadow of “Severance,” but it’s impossible to discuss the former without mentioning the latter. And while “Severance” centers on the capitalist hellscape of millennial professional life, “Bliss Montage” expands itself into every personal, romantic and political nightmare of this generation. Each short story in the aptly-named collection “Bliss Montage” taps into a specific collective truth and turns it into a hysteric fever dream or outright nightmare.
While Ling Ma has already proven herself to be a dazzling storyteller after her first novel “ Severance,” her debut short story collection intuitively breaks into the universal anxieties of modern life.
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