Bliss Montage by Ling Ma5/11/2023 Shen Fever is a metaphor for the emptiness of corporate and consumer culture, where people perform various office tasks mechanically even though their frontal lobes no longer function. They set tables and they try on clothes, as they did in life-but this time, without meaning. That book-eerily foreshadowing COVID-was about a zombie-like plague called Shen Fever which leads its victims to run through their old routines over and over again. Ma’s first novel, Severance, published in 2018, explored similar themes. Ma’s characters-and Ma herself-struggle with the possibility that the only way to escape expectations is to embrace paralysis. Those lives, though, often feel less like liberation and more like stasis. Ma’s protagonists are all fascinated with the possibility of using narrative to fall out of narrative they each try to follow some odd quirk of storytelling into an alternate story and an alternate life. “Fiction can be a space for an alternate self,” an English professor informs a class in “Office Hours,” one of the stories in Ling Ma’s new collection Bliss Montage. The author’s latest collection tries to escape the market and literary clichés-but is this a cliché in itself?
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