What’s the lesson here supposed to be? (192) Except when we came to the end, my mind would go blank. I tried to make up stories, simple fables with a moral lesson. The narrator of “Peking Duck” is troubled by this too, when it comes to finding stories for her daughter: It’s an aversion.” (155)Ībby 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. Ma’s classroom scenes present more than one opportunity for the text to reflect on the studied impropriety of the endings:Ībby interjected: “But that’s the fantasy, right? That there is an escape, there is a way out of …” She trailed off, then restarted. What will it take for those two ragged halves to cleave 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. We are listening for the sound that will bring us back together. Intimacy individuates the voice, whose shape can only be communicated in a series of ambitious metaphors. This plot becomes an object lesson for modern romance. Martin could write, a 60s magazine parody, all plot and pulp. 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. 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): The story disappears through our fingers at the moment of its completion, like the soil brushed away from Petru’s face in “Returning.” 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. 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. Each one of her eight stories ends (or doesn’t end) in the middle of things, formally improper. Here, though, the endings are the tiny, unreal crunch points of the everyday. It’s Ling Ma’s second book, after her much-lauded debut novel Severance, which itself narrated an ending of apocalyptic proportions. Bliss Montage is a study in difficult endings.
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