Ma rides a good concept when she finds one.
Ghosts are the ultimate voyeurs - writers in their ectoplasmic state. “Severance” is a prototype for the best of “Bliss Montage”: surreal but rooted, watching at a remove while the world crumbles.
NYGhost can see but is never seen, both when her city is thronged and when it’s empty. Like all apocalypse Final Girls, she is somewhere she ought not be, in a nether region between humanity and whatever comes next. This much feels familiar from Ma’s lauded comic-dystopian debut novel, 2018’s “ Severance,” in which publishing drudge Candace keeps updating her photography blog, “NYGhost,” after (most of) the rest of the world has been infected by an unusual plague. When characters disappear in these liminal spaces - and quite a few do - it’s unclear whether anyone will ever notice. One woman awakens after a plane lands to discover that her husband has disembarked without her it registers, but barely. Characters float among chatting groups at parties without making a ripple. The pieces share a definite mood, and it’s lonely as hell. The air has been sucked out of all these claustrophobic nowheres. They take place in little pockets removed from “real” life, whatever that means: inside a parallel world hidden behind a wardrobe at a cultish festival in a fictional country on a protracted vacation in a “de-Americanized” world in an MFA workshop. The stories of “Bliss Montage” keep the cover’s cheeky promise. The title and Ma's name are ruffled too, as if the author herself were shrink-wrapping delicious pleasure into a denatured product. On the cover of “Bliss Montage,” clear plastic clings to the nubbled curves of oranges, suffocating all that sunshine-y zing. Ma tells us what it looks like because she knows it matters. It’s a story collection “with a vaguely Chinese cover image of persimmons in a Ming dynasty bowl.” The image implies tradition and delicacy, pretty stories of domestic imbalance and clichéd Eastern promises of good fortune. In “Peking Duck,” one of the standout stories in Ling Ma’s collection, “ Bliss Montage,” a young writer presents an early copy of her new book to her mother. One of my former editors once told me not to mention a book’s cover in a review - that it cheapened the words inside by tying them to the work of the publicity and marketing buzzards.
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