A Little Mysterious Bleeding is a monologue and shares much with Vivian’s fiction and nonfiction prose in that he has a predilection for meditation, for finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, for large questions about existence, human nature and the puzzles of the heart. Vivian has a modernist bent; he seems to be writing about real people, but everything he writes tends to turn around a pattern of imagery. In this case, Chloe’s metonymic bleeding becomes the central image (symbol) of her struggle with the word “love.” It would be reductive to say that A Little Mysterious Bleeding is just the story of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a disappointed Harvard grad; rather, Vivian takes that premise and turns it inside-out like a sock and renders it mythic.