Venita Blackburn’s first novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a book of farewells. We might assume as much from its title, which is both excellent and provocative, but Blackburn has something more than merely language in mind. From the opening sentences, in which a woman named Coral discovers the body of her brother, dead from suicide, in his (yes) Long Beach apartment, Blackburn means to explore questions of presence and of absence, of loss and grief and love and longing, none of which, she insists, will sustain or save us in a universe of entropy and disarray. “What about loneliness?” Blackburn wonders. “What about it? we ask. After destruction, when there is nothing left to fear and nothing left to calculate, wasn’t the Species alone? How does one control something so empty?”
And yet, what other choice do we have but to persevere?
This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
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For Blackburn, these are not abstract issues; her novel seeks to take both the short and the long view. As for the former, the story unfolds across a single week, in which Coral not only finds her brother and deals with the authorities but also begins to impersonate him virtually. The effect is to extend the moment of his dying, the in-betweenness of it, which is to say: to stop time.
This, of course, is what death does. It stops time—forever for the one who has died and more incrementally for those left behind. Eventually, we come to terms or move on in one way or another; the grief spiral can last only so long. With Dead in Long Beach, California, however, Blackburn is working in another register, conflating present and future, framing time through both an individual and a collective lens. How else can we read a novel narrated not by Coral but by a first-person-plural voice she has created for her own project, a science fiction graphic saga that Blackburn interweaves throughout the novel as a book within a book. “We are responsible for telling this story,” the entity informs us, “mostly because Coral cannot.”
On the one hand, this suggests the necessities of storytelling, the way each piece of writing dictates its own form. On the other, it reveals the ingenuity and range of the novel as a form. Throughout Dead in Long Beach, California, Blackburn takes deft advantage of all of it, shifting from Coral’s struggles in the present to the textures of her fiction, which, in turn, opens the book to its own overarching point of view. That such a collective voice comes to us from some place and moment after humanity has self-destructed only adds another layer to the conditionality, the loss and breakdown, that Blackburn intends to invoke.
“Who are you now?” the voice asks. “What are your plans? Where do you see yourself in five, ten, twenty… Do you have any regrets? What would you have done differently? Have you made enemies? Have you made enough enemies? What is the point?” If these questions remain equally necessary and unanswerable, so too, as Blackburn recognizes, does the conundrum of life and death itself.•
