Coral, the protagonist of Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is so disoriented after discovering her dead brother’s body that she takes his cellphone and begins to pose as him. Coral isn’t trying to steal her brother Jay’s identity when she texts her niece, Khadija, or an unknown woman named Summer. But her grief-induced hysteria forces her to confront her own fractured identity and the familial struggles that caused it. Coral, a successful novelist of dystopian fiction, is a woman from Compton whose mother left when she was young. Her father, doing the best he could under the circumstances, was distant at best, which left Coral and Jay, two years apart, to fend for themselves mostly. Jay’s suicide shatters Coral, and in the week in which she impersonates him via texts, recollections from her childhood and adolescence illuminate her current dysfunction.
Blackburn’s conceit of having a sister pose as her dead brother is a clever one, but she takes it a step further, and maybe too far, by filtering the novel’s point of view through characters from Coral’s acclaimed dystopian novel Wildfire. Dead in Long Beach, California is narrated omnisciently by what can be best described as AI “librarians” in a post-apocalyptic world who are “responsible for telling this story mostly because Coral cannot.” The disembodied narrators state that “Coral wrote us into existence. She made us, and we made her money and brought her minor fame in exchange. We are students of her time, this time, and as students, we practice what is known.” The novel’s success hinges on one’s acceptance of this metafictional gambit: Will you buy into the idea that a successful novelist’s characters are narrating her impending breakdown? Blackburn chose to walk a very thin tightrope, and the novel is a constant balancing act. She falls on occasion, but the result is a moving, if infuriating, experimental novel that shines when it leans into its realist elements.
The strongest sections in Dead in Long Beach, California involve Coral’s recollections as she grew up in 1990s Compton. However, I was not drawn to the Wildfire sections and found them a distraction — experimentation for the sake of experimentation can lead to diminishing narrative returns. Little is gained from including sections of the novel within the novel in the text.
The sci-fi elements that are brought in via Wildfire are surely an attempt at highlighting the numbing and dissociative effects of grief, but the trick mostly fails to pay off. Dead in Long Beach, California is an unabashedly experimental novel, but Blackburn’s experiment is a failure if the experimentation detracts from the thematic heart of the novel. I understand what Blackburn was going for by using the intertwined novel-within-a-novel narrative of Wildfire, a metafictional trick making the reader confused and adrift the same way her grieving protagonist must feel. Still, even as I understand that, it feels like an unnecessary gimmick with a limited payoff. As the novel reached its climax, I was invested in Coral’s backstory and her impending breakdown, not by the authorial trickery of interweaving Wildfire into this otherwise fine, nonmeta novel.
At just 238 pages, the novel does at least move along breezily, with the plot contained tightly within a period of one week and pushed along by Coral’s antisocial behavior. And if it doesn’t quite work artistically and intellectually, the battle between sci-fi and domestic realism at least makes for a compelling reading experience, as Blackburn jumps back and forth between styles. One gets the sense that Blackburn, an acclaimed short story writer, is still figuring out how to navigate the novel as a form.
At its core, this is a story about a woman in crisis, but it is filtered through the antiseptic point of view of disembodied narrators studying humanity through a clinical lens. As Coral goes on dates, attends a comic con as a panelist, and continues texting people from her brother’s phone, these declarative asides increasingly become a distraction. Coral is compelling and brilliant enough that I wished Blackburn had chosen a different point of view. The novel would’ve been much stronger if Coral had narrated her own story.
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When Coral decides to come clean and tell Khadija that she’s been the one texting from Jay’s phone, all the experimentation goes out the window. We forget that this is an experimental novel metafictionally narrated by Coral’s fictional creations and only care about the human story. Will Coral be forgiven? Will she forgive herself?
Blackburn is a talented writer still trying to figure out what type of novelist she’s going to be, but Dead in Long Beach, California certainly heralds the arrival of an intriguing new voice. It’s going to be fascinating watching her figure it all out, wonky experimentation and all.
Alex Perez is a fiction writer and cultural critic from Miami. Follow him on Twitter: @Perez_Writes.
