BLISS MONTAGE

Short stories from the author of Severance, winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for fiction.

The narrator of “Los Angeles” lives with her husband, their children, and the children’s au pairs in the east and west wings of their home. Her hundred ex-boyfriends live in the “largest but ugliest wing.” While the narrator takes these past lovers on outings to Moon Juice and LACMA, the husband works at an investment firm. The husband’s dialogue is rendered in dollar signs. This piece feels uncanny in the Freudian sense—as if it is peopled not by actual humans but by ghosts or automata. (There are echoes of Ma’s debut novel, in which a pandemic turns people into zombies that repeat the same everyday action over and over.) In the stories that follow, Ma uses elements of the fantastic but grounds them in a reality that is more recognizably our own. “Without question, the best part of taking G is the beginning. The sensation of invisibility is one of floating. You walk around with a lesser gravity, a low-helium balloon the day after a birthday party.” “G” is the name of a story and the name of the drug the narrator of the story takes with her best friend, Bonnie, on her last night in New York. What begins as a tale about two young women engaging in low-key mayhem because no one can see them turns into a story about two girls who were pressured to become friends because they were both Chinese immigrants—although with very dissimilar experiences of life in the United States. What they want from invisibility is different, and what Bonnie wants from the friend who is about to leave her is everything. The ideas of home and belonging recur throughout the collection. In “Returning,” the narrator meets the man who will become her husband when they are both on a panel for immigrant authors. A trip to his native country to participate in a festival—a trip that is an attempt to salvage their marriage—ends in a macabre, desperate rite. Ma also writes about motherhood and academic life and abusive relationships. These are rich themes, and the author explores them with the logic of dreams.

Haunting and artful.