The narrator of “Oranges,” for example, doesn’t need to follow her abusive ex-boyfriend home to settle a score (his life is perpetually in shambles), and it’d probably be better for her psyche if she didn’t. Freed from the constraints of allegory or standard-issue plot mechanics, readers are instead left to reflect on more essential things, most prominently, humanity’s ability to absorb and inflict harm. This initial story sets the tone for Bliss Montage’s woozy relationship with plausibility. Call it speculative fiction if you want, but the ground situation that informs “Los Angeles”-the wife of a wealthy investor shares their domestic compound with all 100 of her ex-boyfriends-is about as reasonable as homeless University of California students being “allowed” to sleep in their cars on campus. Nevertheless, the collection guts and renovates the genre by refusing to draw a distinction between realism and fable. Bliss Montage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Ling Ma’s second book and first collection of stories, is ostentatious in neither syntax nor storytelling.
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