Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California works beautifully—it’s a hard-to-forget first novel—even though it’s not, by most definitions, a very good novel. That’s because, by most definitions, it’s not a novel at all: it is an essay in fragments on alienation, dressed up as a postmodern novella about a science fiction novelist’s very bad week. A writer named Coral discovers her brother, Jay, in his apartment, dead from apparent suicide. She picks up his unlocked cell phone, reads his texts, and, over the course of eight realistic days in present-day Southern California, pretends to be him, messaging his girlfriend and his daughter, Khadija, as if he remained alive.
This strand of the novel follows Coral as she accomplishes nothing in particular, musing on her failure to figure things out. She walks and drives around or near Long Beach, disturbed, distracted, sometimes dissociated. She visits a comic con where fans want to celebrate her dystopian novel, Wildfire. She thinks back to the childhood she shared with Jay in Compton, and about how she and Jay worked to raise Khadija, and—surprising herself—about Khadija’s mother, Naima, now lost to drink and drugs.
Another kind of novelist (Virginia Woolf is the obvious, unfair comparison) could get half a novel, or an entire novel, out of Coral’s states of mind. Blackburn does not try: Coral’s path from denial to acceptance, and her flailing choices in between, instead come to us through a nameless, distant “we,” a collective narrator who uses the events in the book as jumping-off points for aphorisms about human life, and commodity culture, and capitalism. Some aphorisms appear to draw on the late anthropologist David Graeber’s theory of debt as the driver of civilization, perhaps as the root of all evil.
Others suggest that the postmodern condition has made us all sick. “We” name the spaces that Coral moves through not (or not only) as an animal shelter, a courtroom, a house, a hotel, and so on but as various (capitalized) Clinics. “In the Clinic for Outrageous Disguises That Cloak All Evidence of Frailty, Loneliness and Terror, we go bowling.” “In the Clinic for Dying While Willfully Participating in a Poorly Thought-Out Cultural Trend and Becoming a Martyr for Revolution, we confess our most recent horror to the nearest living thing, a creature of no consequence.… The creature is a dog.”
Even when not conjuring uncanny clinics, “we” generalize, sometimes about Coral, sometimes about families, sometimes about all of modern life: “During this period, the Species mixed chemicals with artificial fibers to make an inexpensive product that looked like a natural substance and was ultimately devastating to the environment.” “We” take an interest in Coral less as an individual and more as a way to learn how human beings work.
Who are “we”? Perhaps “we” are robots, or aliens, or (as in Fredrik Pohl’s Man Plus) future AIs who want to understand their designers well enough to save themselves. Perhaps, instead, “we” are characters from Wildfire, whose lightly sketched, gun-toting protagonist (named __________—yes, that’s a blank space) collects debts for the Nation, which is also a monopoly corporation. How did the Nation get that way? Neither Blackburn nor Coral says, though they do let us know that “Red Autumn”—apparently a bioweapon gone wrong—caused the mass casualties that wrecked our own society. “Red Autumn did not hum with purpose, knowledge or destiny. It was an emptying of a Species”; in its wake, “dying seemed no different from being born.”
Excerpts from Wildfire—also couched in a cold, collective voice—show up in between slices of Coral’s narrative. “By our best estimations we can safely say that ________ approached her profession with a perfect understanding of its mundanity.… As long as more than one human being walked upright, one would owe the other a debt, eventually.” Later, we read bits from erotic fan fiction about the novel, along with online comments about that fan fiction.
By the end of Dead in Long Beach, California, everything except for Jay’s death, and perhaps Khadija’s needs, feels like a fiction of some sort, liable to melt like snow in the light of the real. Not that there’s much snow in Long Beach, or in Compton: Blackburn’s story feints at being a Southern California novel, or a neighborhood novel, or a realist novel about two generations of a Black family, just as it feints at being a character study focused on a distant and grief-wrecked Coral. Despite its lovely resolution, the book works as none of those things.
Instead, it excels as an essay mixed with a light-on-action novella: a wiry structure on which to hang detached observations about what capital does to us, about how what we owe one another (honesty, loyalty, passion) turns into debts we think we cannot pay. Watching Coral try, and fail, to keep track of Khadija, watching fans see themselves in the alienated ___________, Blackburn’s distanced narrators ask how it feels to stand outside all the illusions we fallible humans build for ourselves, even as they—eventually, gingerly—lead Coral back into minimal human connection.
With those tactics—aphorism, long perspective, distance from all the characters, cold eyes cast on bodies, capital, and landscape—Blackburn follows a science fictional lead. Her assortment of fragments, her conclusory paragraphs, and her back-and-forth technique will remind old sci-fi hands of J.G. Ballard (1930–2009), who took his own hard, cold looks at grief, capital, and concrete with The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). In its opening pages, Ballard’s main character joins a “Casualties Union” to practice “the simulation of wounds”; for him, the idea of World War III “has become an expression of the failure of his psyche to accept the fact of its own consciousness, and of his revolt against the present continuum of time and space.” Meanwhile “strange twins,” “couriers from his own unconscious…drove through the endless suburbs,” whose “concrete landscape of underpass and overpass” reflects an inner geometry of alienation and pain.
Yet Blackburn has no more copied Ballard directly than she has copied Woolf (or Michael Cunningham or John Lanchester, to name other Dalloway homage-payers). Instead, she has moved his dissociations, his inquiries, his mini-essays, and his personae into new spaces, where she proves that they belong: the commercial emptiness of Blackburn’s Long Beach, the close-knit Compton of Coral’s childhood, as well as the world of counterfactual, nonrealistic imagination itself. Coral may end up back at Jay’s apartment, after visiting an animal shelter (a symbol of organic being), but she belongs not there but at the science fiction convention, where (Coral tells herself, ruefully) she “was loved in a way she felt nowhere else on earth.”•
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.
