This month’s California Book Club selection, Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California, is dedicated to those who didn’t have time to say their goodbyes. It’s a book of grief, but in its fascinating structure, it also speaks to the role of imagination in filling the void left by loss and to authoring narratives of life and death. The chorus of characters who narrate the novel admit the inevitability of death, the larger self-destructiveness of humans, with their already brief lives, resulting not only in the individual suicide but also the extinction of civilization, and say, “Life as we know it was a fleeting, miraculous thing, intangible and always humming with the imperceptible vibrations of the universe.”
Films have long pillaged the lives of authors for material—most of the movies featuring writers are feather-light on the realities of a writing life, but there are some interesting films that share resonances with Blackburn’s novel. Many of them play in a markedly different register than Blackburn’s one-of-a-kind book, but like that work, all are fascinating in their consideration of authors’ minds.
Most recently, there’s American Fiction. Working from prior CBC author Percival Everett’s acerbic novel Erasure but doubling down on its melancholic vibe, director Cord Jefferson tells the story of Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), an intellectual Black novelist and English-lit professor who becomes frustrated with the publishing world’s expectation that Black authors and books conform to insulting stereotypes. He writes a novel intended to spoof a popular “ghetto novel” by another Black author that is riddled with ugly clichés, but to his dismay, the literary world takes his parody seriously. At film’s end, the narrative spins into metafictional fantasy about the book’s adaptation into film.
Western culture and Romanticism weave a skein of individual celebrity around authors, notwithstanding that books are collective works. Maxwell Perkins was the editor of a number of writers considered to be masters. Among Perkins’s authors was Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward, Angel. The biographical drama Genius, directed by Michael Grandage and starring Colin Firth as Perkins and Jude Law as Wolfe, complicates the Romantic notion of authorship. In a later part of the movie, Wolfe’s wife (Nicole Kidman) tells him he needs to spend more time alone. He says, “I’m a writer. All I do is spend time alone.” She responds, “No, you’re a writer and you spend time with your characters. First you had your family, then you had me, then you had Max. You need to spend time alone. You need to look at how you move through your life.… Human beings aren’t fiction.”
Anomalisa, a stop-motion animated film, written and codirected by Charlie Kaufman, is about an author’s solipsistic consciousness and perceptions, and a moody atmosphere of grief and sorrow seeps into every exchange. Customer-service expert and speaker Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) experiences every other person, including his family, as having the same face and voice. When he goes to promote his book at a conference, he stays at the Fregoli Hotel (a person with the Fregoli delusion believes different people are one person in various disguises), where he overhears a woman’s voice—a voice different from the one in which everyone else seems to speak.
Violette, directed by Martin Provost, is a memorable and gritty biopic about Violette Leduc (Emmanuelle Devos), a mostly forgotten, emotionally messy but brilliant French feminist writer who was mentored by and had unrequited love for existentialist heavyweight Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex), played by Sandrine Kiberlain. Leduc comes to Beauvoir with her manuscript L’Asphyxie in desperation, and Beauvoir sees brilliance in her (as well as, perhaps, an ally within the male-dominated literary circles she runs in), commenting, “You’ve written a fine book. Powerful, intrepid.” Storytelling, for Leduc (as for Blackburn’s character Coral), proves to be survival.
The premise of Stranger Than Fiction, a fun, loopy choice from 2006, positions the author as a kind of god. Will Ferrell plays an IRS auditor, Harold Crick, who becomes aware that his movements are being narrated in a third-person-omniscient voice of a British woman—and that he is going to meet his end. Harold confronts the author with the request that she not kill him.
Next up, Adaptation. Yes, Kaufman again—watch it as a double feature with Anomalisa. For this dark and zany film, directed by Spike Jonze, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman writes a self-loathing screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman, who is hired to adapt journalist Susan Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) nonfiction book The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession. The book is about John LaRoche (Chris Cooper), a passionate orchid dealer who is arrested along with three Seminole Indians for stealing a rare swamp orchid. A good book—but Kaufman, slow and depressed, suffers serious writer’s block in trying to turn it into a film.
Tom Stoppard cowrote the witty, gender-bending screenplay for Shakespeare in Love. The film is about a young Will Shakespeare, performed by Joseph Fiennes, who is out of ideas when he meets Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow), a young noblewoman dressed as a boy, who becomes his muse. Art begets more art, including, by the end, the beginnings of another Shakespearean masterpiece, Twelfth Night.
Providence, from 1977, is enigmatic. Some may find the film more intriguing than good—back in the day, film critic Pauline Kael wrote a takedown. But it possesses what to my mind is critical to this kind of movie—an off-kilter, eerie, dreamlike power that suggests the slipperiness of reality and fiction. Directed by unique French filmmaker Alain Resnais, the movie opens on the imagination of a sick, alcoholic writer, Clive Langham, played by John Gielgud. On the night before his 78th birthday, he’s drunkenly composing surreal scenes for a novel in progress that features characters based on his family—in one, an old man is being hunted and turns into a werewolf with a death wish. The next day is the writer’s birthday party—is what he imagined true?•
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.
FUTURISTIC CHORUS
Read poet and critic Taylor Byas’s essay on the role of the chorus in framing the reader experience of the protagonist’s behavior in Dead in Long Beach, California. —Alta
WHY I WRITE
In a lovely essay, Blackburn writes, “Writing provides a highway to navigate joy and tragedy where everything is in the rearview mirror, distorted but accessible.” —Alta
EDGES OF DREAMS
Lynell George interviews Lynne Thompson about her fourth poetry collection, Blue on a Blue Palette, a “book that draws inspiration from her native city, women’s histories, and racial reckonings, stitched together by a sturdy throughline of persistence.” —Alta
12 JULY BOOKS
Consider new titles about the West that we’re looking forward to this month, including Joy Williams’s Concerning the Future of Souls, Sarah Manguso’s Liars, and Jesse Katz’s The Rent Collectors: Exploitation, Murder, and Redemption in Immigrant LA. —Alta
DARK, SWEET NOTE
Read author and artist Lisa Teasley’s “Wendy Carmel, Carmel Wendy,” a spiritual and sensual story of grief assuaged in Carmel and Big Sur. —Alta
“CHANGE OF HEART AND CONSCIENCE”
Critically acclaimed author Joy Williams shares the books on her nightstand in “By the Book.” Asked about whom she’d invite to a literary dinner party, she says, “This is not the time for dinner parties! Serene consumption, self-treasuring and holding forth will not heal our stricken earth.” —New York Times
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