Most of humanity seems mysterious and strange, a little addled, in Venita Blackburn’s contemporary, mind-bending novel Dead in Long Beach, California, the California Book Club’s July selection—wasn’t it ever thus? This is an existential, speculative, self-reflexive novel (read our review here)—one in which the meaning of life (and death) is various, multivalent, sad, a little absurd, and wild, not only in terms of its substance but also its structure and its style.
We know from the start that we are in for something unusual because of the cryptic first sentences. “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot. She just discovered her brother dead in his apartment. Suicide.” Immediately, Blackburn produces a peculiar suspense around whom this collective “we” might be, a question more pointed because the main character is somehow ill-equipped for narrativizing her life. Why can’t Coral tell us the story? And why did her brother commit suicide?
Coral is a science fiction graphic novelist. “We” are characters Coral has invented, machine librarians trying to understand humans and their self-destructiveness. The directness of the collective’s speech is partially produced by the present tense, but there’s an immediacy, a rhythmic spareness to how these machines speak to us, starting with a fairly transparent and simple sentence. We slip between this not-yet-identified science-minded group and a slightly different voice that we’re not sure whether to attribute to the machines or Coral’s own mind—to the extent these are even different sources.
The novel doesn’t reveal that all-knowing identity of the narrator until the fifth page: “Coral wrote us into existence.… We are students of her time, this time, and as students we practice what is known.” Coral is a graphic novelist who works on science fiction books, and these are her characters, machine librarians who study humans, their tone mystified and cool. Their curiosity seems boundless, never emotional, always clinical, observational, and perhaps this estranged quality is fitting, since they are using “clinics” of memory to understand Coral—and her species, our species, us more broadly.
Still, there is a certain groundedness to the prose—it’s not all ethereal and airy. While the presence of machine librarians defamiliarizes the setting and a sense of physicality, Blackburn places us firmly, unforgettably in Long Beach, “an oily, salty city nicknamed Weirdbeach.” This setting does a lot of work—the narrator provides a descriptor that this nickname is used by those not likely to fly a gay-pride flag on their lawns. The observation ties the concrete place with the unusual happenings of the novel and also hints at Coral’s own lesbian sexuality.
The dim studio where Coral’s brother, Jay, lived is filled with a series of blue things, but Blackburn doesn’t stop with the solid nouns and ordinary color description and instead slides into a more lyric and complex thought: “It was like diving into the ocean at any time of day, if the ocean…smelled like burned bacon and coconut-scented candles.” Like Blackburn’s intimate short stories, this feels like poetry, but it also feels as though it refuses the lulling artifice that is suggested by “diving into the ocean.” The sentence shifts from the possible to eagle-eyed specifics—concrete images of burned bacon and coconut-scented candles. Similarly, Coral refers to moving bluntly, colloquially as “some bullshit,” and her address to Jay, who she doesn’t realize is dead, is honest, contemporary, littered with tiny bombs of obscenity. When the librarians (evidently) say, “Death IRL is an ice bath from the inside out,” we recognize this is likely closer to Coral’s own speech patterns.
There’s an impossibility here: Coral writes these machines who study her, yet there are a number of ways in which they (and Coral) are ciphers. Which one is writing the other? Is Coral, in some sense, their character?
This broad movement between the interestingly lyrical and the real and unpleasant plays across Blackburn’s risk-taking fiction as Coral discovers Jay’s body and then begins to impersonate him via texts to his friends and family. Seemingly, it is a way of keeping him somehow present and avoiding the painfulness of death, and the solace of that seems essential to Coral, a character unwilling to directly confront her own emotions. The librarians study Coral, but they do not, not really, understand the why of her behavior with regard to her brother’s suicide. Still, we follow this alluring voice, mulling its unusual insights about us.
Dead in Long Beach, California is among the most intriguing novels of the year, laced with some of the state’s most defining subcultures—California queer scenes, comic conventions, seeming fan fiction, and quasi-metafictive maneuvers.•
Join us on July 25 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Blackburn will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Dead in Long Beach, California. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
EXCERPT
Read the opening of Dead in Long Beach, California. —Alta
EVENT RECAP
If you missed the CBC meeting with Javier Zamora, read the recap or watch the video. —Alta
SUMMER OF PRIDE
Choose among these books by California LGBTQ authors for Pride month and beyond. —Alta
WRITER’S ROOM
Read about author Francine Prose’s first memoir, 1974, after a half century of writing fiction—and the hauntings that led her to write the book. —Alta
“GESTURE OF SURVIVAL”
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin calls Gil Cuadros’s My Body Is Paper an “epitaph and testament.” Cuadros, Ulin says, was “among the first Latino writers to engage the subject of AIDS from the inside.” —Alta
HEAVY TOLL
Karen Solt, author of Hiding for My Life: Being Gay in the Navy, will be in conversation with Tania Malik (Hope You Are Satisfied) in Corte Madera on Thursday, June 27, at 6 p.m. —Book Passage
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