We are responsible for telling this story,” Venita Blackburn opens her conceptually ambitious, delightfully queer novel Dead in Long Beach, California, “mostly because Coral cannot.” It’s a telling first line. Coral’s brother, Jay, a single father, has killed himself in his apartment, and although she discovers him with his phone, the shock will not dissipate into dramatic spectacle. Instead, Coral takes the phone and begins texting, impersonating Jay to his friends and lovers, thereby occupying the expansive virtual space he has left behind. Later, she’ll create a previously nonexistent social media footprint for him before stepping into his reality.
There are moments, as when Coral answers, as her brother, a text from Jay’s daughter, when the novel points to something viscerally disturbing. Yet Dead in Long Beach, California comes mostly marked by an atmosphere of self-estrangement, produced in part by its first-person plural narrator. The language offers an intriguing contrast with that of Blackburn’s story collection How to Wrestle a Girl. Both books bring humor and literary experiment to considerations of the body and the self in contemporary life. Here, however, the tone seems to transform the nature of mourning, the insoluble desire to be close to a dear person who has been irrevocably lost, into a plot that dramatizes grief’s power to leave one’s self evacuated, still occupying a particular body, yet for the most part somewhere else.
The “we” of the narration turns out to be a synthesis created by machines from the future whose reportage about humanity is decidedly anthropological. By turn wise and funny and mystical, they comprise a voice vaguely reminiscent of the collective narrator of Brit Bennett’s The Mothers, as the machines access Coral’s memories of her brother and even those Jay shared with others. The machines emerge, first, as characters Coral has imagined and written in her science fiction graphic novel Wildfire, excerpts of which are nested within Dead in Long Beach, California. The plot of Coral’s book runs in parallel to the primary narrative, and its futurism provides a vivid counterpoint.
In Wildfire, as Coral lays it out, these machines represent children learning about our society, but also mothers remembering, and librarians archiving evidence within “the registrar of all life” after a catastrophic biological weapon has done its business of destruction. While Coral has the ability to be clear in language, she also knows “the words had to stay locked inside with no way to shake them free.” Her personality doesn’t allow for unabandoned expression; rather, the multiplicity of characters, the society of them, becomes a way to make sense of a set of conventions, a human condition, that feels alien, more so in the wake of her brother’s death. The machines catalog civilization, including the daily stuff of Coral’s life.
Most importantly, in Coral’s stead, this collective voice made up of her imagined selves shares not only memory but also insight about the strangeness of humans, both the empirical, tangible details of the species and also koan-like statements such as, “The questions of the father make poetry out of the daughters.” This brings into play each reader’s associative intuitions.
Tonally, the novel is eerily poetic, elegiac for a bygone society (ours). “We created clinics,” the voice recalls, “to practice all the ways people stopped their lives in order for us to understand them better. The clinics are much like theaters designed to look like suburbs and farm communities and coastal villages and urban centers and abandoned cabins in dense unmapped woods.”
These various memory clinics serve as entryways into the sepia-tinged theaters of Coral’s inner life, even as the expansive world of Wildfire grows so intricate and open to alternative possibilities that it inspires fan fiction, sometimes abstruse, and then ripples out into comments from fellow enthusiasts.
Blackburn infuses the nested novel with the “delirious” energy of attendees at a comics convention, and it becomes clear that this image from Coral’s memory is the source of the book’s larger narrative sensibility. The collective dissects such gatherings at an anthropological level: “There used to be comic conventions held all over the globe to celebrate fandoms of various degrees of sincerity, the uninhibited joy of reveling in the worlds that began in one mind and were inherited by millions to occupy in various mediums.” At the same time, Blackburn gives us an open-ended close that allows for further possibilities, just as fiction built for fans to fill in the blanks sometimes does.
History is full of inflection points after which nothing in a society remains the same—when monarchs are toppled, when democracy crumbles—and now, when humanity destroys its own planet and, therefore, itself. “We could tell you,” the collective reflects, “that the handmade world was beautiful. We could tell of the lights in the night, the textures of the streets, the scents of the food. All would be inadequate to describe the unsettled minds that inhabited that place.” The beauty of Blackburn’s fun and complex novel, in other words, resides in its intense discernment of our species as a troubled, self-destructive, glorious one.•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
