Perhaps the most successful intimate communication occurs in “Yeti Lovemaking” when the Yeti and the narrator express themselves in wordless mating calls, his like an “oceanic bass line that churned up seabeds,” hers “like a shriek down a hall of mirrors” until hitting a pitch that only the two of them could hear. Or the narrator in “G” who tries to speak when invisible under the drug’s influence and only makes moaning sounds. Or the husband in “LA” who speaks in dollar signs. There is the lover in “Tomorrow”who speaks warm and endearing things to the narrator but only when he thinks she is asleep, and sends an email that turns into a functional document when he’d been thinking of a loving dream of the narrator because all his tender thoughts turn to “cement” when he tries to express them. They can never express who they are or what they want. The stopping at those crucial moments can be frustrating for a reader, but for me those moments capture a key idea, that most of the characters, while sharply perceptive in their thoughts about each other, almost never can speak their truths face to face. ” ‘Fiction can be a space for the alternate self,’ he would tell them … ‘It often serves as a fantasy space for our other selves.’ ” In a sense, that is a description of what Ling Ma is doing in Bliss Montage, except that she focuses on the other selves trying to be born and often catches them (and stops) just as they are emerging.

In “Returning” the narrator quotes her husband describing fiction to his college class.

She doesn’t try to build to a knock-out punch but closes many stories at a heightened moment that leaves you on edge and having to think back over how the different strands of narrative have led you to that point. Each of Ling Ma’s stories works by building resemblances, interweaving several stories of different relationships to bring out truths about each one that otherwise might slip by.

Bliss montage