Reality has been a fiction ever since we left the cave, but it has felt especially fictitious of late, and that is reflected in quite a lot of books that call themselves realistic. Even though most people live multiple lives now—digitally, professionally, internally—a lot of fiction assures us that thoughts typically come one at a time. That our selves are coherent, predictable vehicles that we have control over. That the internet interrupts our lives about as often as background noise.

In truth, hasn’t reality become a little bit more tornadic in the past two decades? Thoughts and fantasies and projections and memes—in a world without privacy, of socially externalized selves lived online and offline—are all spliced together, projected and poorly hidden. And this leaking container/curated performance called the self? Surely it has several different identities and avatars, lurking all within it.

If this sounds at all straightforward to you, chances are you will feel that Venita Blackburn has written one of the first truly realistic novels of the 21st century. Dead in Long Beach, California, her sidewinding, immensely clever debut novel, moves like life—speedily, knowingly, metafictionally, and, still, devastatingly. It’s a book about how neither drowning in stories nor the ability to spin them can protect you when they happen to you, as its protagonist, Coral, finds out in the opening pages of the novel.

As we begin, Coral is gutted to discover that Jay, her beloved, annoying, doing-his-best-as-a-single-parent brother, has taken his life. She is shattered. She had just seen him days earlier with his daughter, Khadija, for dinner. She’d texted with him. What could possibly have happened? Blackburn’s novel is less concerned with the mystery of Jay’s decision than its impact on Coral, who immediately begins to disassociate.

The first signal of this reaction is the book’s narrative voice, which ebbs and flows into a first-person-plural chorus, a kind of emotionally cognizant gang of Siris who begin: “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.” It’s an astonishing opening because it manages to be warm and aloof at the same time, robotic and empathic, a register perfectly suited for the hinges this book will use to get in and out of hard truths, projected identities, fantasy, and heartbreak.

Blackburn is best known, until now, as the writer of flash fiction and short stories. Dead in Long Beach, California will change that, thanks in part to her nimbleness at framing, manipulating time, and using tiny alterations in voice—essentially, all the techniques that made her great in smaller spaces—to move this story along. Her novel is also a marvel of interlocking structures. As a week ticks by, the past comes scissoring back. Between sections of Coral’s hit graphic novel, Wildfire, clues flicker into view, like a window into a life in the world of late capital, where every relationship is transactional, every aspect of identity monitored, every decision augmentable and changeable.

Coral, as a fiction writer, has lived in a constantly mutable world, psychologically, for a long time. When asked a question on a date, she lies, because why not? Who doesn’t when it comes to their online profiles? This minute but pervasive bit of alteration is one of many instances in which the presentation of who Coral is accordions into a series of masks.

She is a hardworking freelancer, a writer who wants attention, a gay woman who has dated men, and a daughter who wishes she was treated less like a girl. Managing all the ways she is read and typed produces in Coral a deflective shimmer: a constant sense of living inside a story or a meme. Or maybe that’s just modern life?

So it’s not as strange as you’d think, when someone texts her brother, for Coral to reply from Jay’s phone as him—kicking off a weeklong immersion in his life, full of painful improvisations and imaginative leaps and an odd bit of housekeeping. He has no digital footprint, and so Coral must create one, complete with social media profiles, to cover up the lies she tells and also procrastinate dealing with reality.

A few books come to mind while reading Dead in Long Beach, California, most notably, Zadie Smith’s NW, in which a woman’s fracturing marriage leads her into corners of the internet, while her everyday life takes place in northwest London. Returning to everyday life from the swirl of make-believe, Smith’s heroine finds surfaces extrabright, strange, highly textured.

Dead in Long Beach, California unfolds in a similar time period, but it was written more recently. All of the book is skittering along made or fabricated surfaces. Projections. One of the novel’s deeper points concerns how this habit of dissociating into narrative—in an era of crisis, which the book slowly paints—engineers our sense of others. Our sense of how to imagine them. Coral feels so capable of inserting herself into her brother’s life that she even has a conversation with herself (over text) as him.

By this point, Jay has been at the morgue for a few days. But does this matter in grief? Blackburn’s novel employs three time frames, and she weaves them to create an odd sense of un-present that feels like shock. One of these time frames is the week after Jay’s suicide; the other is the life Coral shared with him growing up; and the third is life in America now, and on this front, she uses the peculiar magic of the choral voice to superb effect. Narrating Coral’s life in choral voice—the pun is apt—our narrative device is free to comment at will on all the various trappings of modern life.

From debt to drugs, from online dating to the habits of work life and who gets to win the meeting, the emptiness and loneliness of modern existence emerge from this novel in terrifying clarity. Even with all the tools of surveillance and expression at her fingertips, even a writer like Coral can’t say exactly what she means in person, nor can she excavate what resists knowing.

The devastating truth that haunts this novel like a melody is that Coral clearly feels that she didn’t know Jay as much as she thought she did—otherwise, wouldn’t she have seen this catastrophe coming? Dead in Long Beach, California asks us if stories are all, in a way, a form of evasion from truths that cannot be summed up in an arc or a genre. As if to poke fun at this instinct to predict through storytelling, as we move from day to day, the chorus who narrate Coral’s sections give each set of memories a catchy genre title or two.

“The Clinic for Excavating Repressed Memories in Search of Solutions to Current Crises” is the moniker of sorts that kicks off the novel and its series of flashbacks from Coral’s childhood, raised alongside her brother, more by her father than mother. “In the Clinic for Dying While Willfully Participating in a Poorly Thought-Out Cultural Trend” is the chorus’s jokey name for a section that reads like an origin story, which validates Coral’s lesbian identity.

The speed with which Blackburn moves around in these sections is dazzling, arresting, and deeply lifelike. Even as this book makes us laugh, it knows it has opened up a window, a little one, between that expulsion of air and the knowledge that all of us live in a world of hard, inescapable truths. Some of us juggle this knowledge better than others. Some of us simply can’t. The way that Blackburn acknowledges that this variety can exist within one person is perhaps the most dazzling aspect of all.•

Join us on July 25 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Blackburn will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Myriam Gurba to discuss Dead in Long Beach, California. Register for the Zoom conversation here.