Porousness is a critical element of Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California, the July California Book Club selection. Whose narrative is this? a reader might fairly ask partway through the book. Perspectives and documents are collaged together, motifs and themes gaining visibility more from their juxtapositions than from the substance of any single narrative.
A theme of ownership threads through, emerging primarily from the sewing together of different considerations of property and possession. Dead in Long Beach, California grapples not only with who owns the narrative in a formal sense but also with who possesses it, with the multiple meanings that possession intimates, since you might own a story, and yet there are others who possess copies of the book, the stories of which play out in their own mental theaters. And then there is, of course, the ghostly sense of possession—the protagonist, Coral, a science fiction graphic novelist, is possessed by her brother, Jay, by her memories of him. But conversely, Coral concretely possesses Jay’s tools to communicate himself to the world. As the person who survives him, she is left with the agency to enact him, to perform him, to inhabit him, to be a kind of ghost in the machine of social media and texts, at least as far as others are concerned.
After his death, his life becomes a kind of wig—I’m drawing from images in the book—that Coral is able to try on. Impersonating him serves to keep him close, allowing her to cling to his spirit, even as he let go of life; in grief, she possesses his public narrative.
Other sorts of possession are referenced here and there. For instance, Coral’s niece, Khadija, may be selfish, as Coral claims, but she also absorbs voices in her vicinity. “She listened. She made herself small and silent and a sponge of every voice around her.” Again, there’s this haunting, underlying sense in which Khadija takes possession of other people, mapping their voices to form her own sense of self.
Coral’s graphic science fiction novel, Wildfire, experiments with a story about a different aspect of ownership, the right to claim return of what has been lent. The main character, known as ________________, is a debt collector. The book contends with authorship, with characters as pieces of self, free-floating, but it also wrestles with fandom—with readers who claim characters for themselves and, in their possession of the text, generate their own narratives. A story is never only one thing, only one person’s, the book suggests. When writing fan fiction, fans are empowered to take characters they love in different, surprising directions.
In the middle of Dead in Long Beach, California, we get excerpts from fan fiction written in response to Wildfire. In the fan fiction “Anemone Gets a Dick,” a fan named queerbanana writes about just that—a character purchasing and possessing that appendage, considered, in the story’s universe, a luxury item.
The passages about the wigs worn at comic cons, too, suggest a kind of metaphoric gesture toward possession, not only of the wig but of a different self that is otherwise inaccessible. Fans use the personas of authors’ characters to achieve a kind of freedom for themselves.
In a section that features Coral as a panelist at a comic con, Blackburn writes of “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.” The author’s imagination allows for this transfer, the gesture of providing a happy possession, it’s suggested.
Perhaps Coral needs to make a kind of fiction in her performance of Jay to recover from the shock of his suicide. In the face of the abundant chaos that Blackburn sketches as representations of the human conditions, there is the feeling that Coral has not possessed enough and that her experience of lack, of not knowing enough, needing to know more, motivates her actions in the week following Jay’s suicide. “If Coral understood the world,” Blackburn writes, “she would’ve been born in mourning, knowing that what was cherished had already been buried, realizing that the road to the past had been erased.”•
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.
ART OBJECTS
CBC editor Anita Felicelli profiles Jonathan Lethem in connection with his latest, Cellophane Bricks, a collection of art writing. —Alta
DEBT SOCIETY
Critic and poet Stephanie Burt examines the import of Venita Blackburn’s novel within a novel in Dead in Long Beach, California and literary predecessors. —Alta
KALEIDOSCOPIC BEAUTY
Erik Himmelsbach-Weinstein reviews Patrick Nathan’s page-turner The Future Was Color, writing that it “juxtaposes nihilism with a yearning for significance.” —Alta
SCIENCE FICTIONAL ANIMALS
Author Joy Lanzendorfer writes about San Diego’s Frozen Zoo, the largest biobank for living cell cultures, which keeps the DNA of endangered species, the better to ensure species survival through cloning. —Alta
REALITY MIRRORING ART
Prior CBC special guest Rebecca Makkai (I Have Some Questions for You) writes about recently learning that beloved and Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro had stayed with the man who sexually abused her daughter. —Los Angeles Times
ENVIRONMENTAL SHORT FICTION
Bay Area author Nina Schuyler will appear in conversation with fellow writer Susanne Pari to discuss Schuyler’s lovely collection about the climate crisis, In This Ravishing World, in Palo Alto tonight at 7 p.m. —Books Inc.
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