“Dead in Long Beach, California”

If this sounds even remotely straightforward to you, you probably feel that Venita Blackburn has written one of the first truly realistic novels of the 21st century. Dead in Long Beach, Californiaher twisty, immensely clever debut novel, moves like life – fast, knowing, metafictional, yet devastating. 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 protagonist Coral finds out in the novel’s opening pages.

At the beginning, Coral is devastated to learn that Jay, her beloved, annoying brother who is doing his best as a single father, has taken his own life. She is devastated. She had seen him at dinner with his daughter Khadija only days before. She had been texting with him. What could have happened? Blackburn’s novel is less concerned with the mystery of Jay’s decision than with its effect on Coral, who immediately begins to distance herself from her.

The first signal of this response is the book’s narrative voice, which swells and turns into a first-person plural chorus, a kind of emotionally aware band of Siris who begin, “We are responsible for telling this story, especially because Coral can’t.” It’s an astonishing beginning, because it manages to be warm and distant at once, robotic and empathetic, a tone that fits perfectly with the hinges this book uses to shift between hard truths, projected identities, fantasy, and heartbreak.

Blackburn is best known as an author of flash fiction and short stories. Dead in Long Beach, California will change that, thanks in part to her adeptness at framing, manipulating time, and using tiny changes in voice—essentially all the techniques that made her great in smaller spaces—to drive this story forward. Her novel is also a marvel of interlocking structures. As a week passes, the past comes back. Between sections of Coral’s successful graphic novel WildfireClues flicker up, like a window into a life in the world of late capital, where every relationship is a transaction, every aspect of identity is monitored, and every decision is extensible and changeable.

As a novelist, Coral has long lived psychologically in an ever-changing world. If you ask her a question on a date, she’ll lie, because why wouldn’t she? Who wouldn’t when it comes to their online profile? This tiny but far-reaching change is one of many cases where the portrayal of Coral’s personality is cloaked in a series of masks.

She’s a hard-working freelancer, a writer who wants attention, a lesbian who has dated men, and a daughter who wishes she were treated less like a girl. The way she’s read and typed creates a distracting tinge in Coral: a constant feeling of living inside a story or a meme. Or maybe that’s just modern life?

So it’s not as odd as you might think that when someone texts her brother, Coral responds from Jay’s phone – and so begins a week-long immersion into his life, full of painful improvisations and imaginative leaps and odd housekeeping. He has no digital footprint, so Coral must create one, complete with social media profiles, to cover up the lies she tells and delay confronting reality.

While reading, some books come to mind Dead in Long Beach, Californiaespecially Zadie Smith’s NWin which a woman’s crumbling marriage leads her to the corners of the internet while her everyday life plays out in north-west London. When Smith’s heroine returns from the maelstrom of fantasy to everyday life, she finds surfaces particularly bright, strange and highly textured.

Dead in Long Beach, California is set in a similar time period but written more recently. The whole book flits across made or fabricated surfaces. Projections. One of the deeper points of the novel concerns how this habit of dissolving into narrative – in an era of crisis that the book slowly paints – affects our sense of others. Our sense of how we imagine them. Coral feels so able to insert herself into her brother’s life that she even has a conversation with herself (via text) as him.

By this point, Jay has already been in the morgue for several days. But does that matter when it comes to grief? Blackburn’s novel uses three timelines, and she weaves them together to create a strange sense of absence that feels like a shock. One of those timelines is the week after Jay’s suicide; the other is the life Coral shared with him growing up; and the third is life in contemporary America, and on this front she uses the peculiar magic of the choral voice to excellent effect. By telling Coral’s life in choral voice—the pun is apt—our narrative style is free to comment at will on all sorts of pitfalls of modern life.

From debt to drugs, from online dating to the habits of working life and who wins the meeting, the emptiness and loneliness of modern existence emerge with terrifying clarity in this novel. Even with all the means of surveillance and expression at her disposal, even a writer like Coral cannot say exactly what she personally means, nor can she expose what resists knowledge.

The devastating truth that runs like a melody through this novel is that Coral clearly feels that she doesn’t know Jay as well as she thought she did. Otherwise, why wouldn’t she have seen this disaster coming? Dead in Long Beach, California asks us if stories are, in some ways, a form of escape from truths that can’t be contained in a plot arc or genre. As if to mock this instinct to use storytelling to predict as we go from day to day, the chorus members 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 a kind of title that begins the novel and its series of flashbacks from Coral’s childhood, raised along with her brother by her father rather than her mother. “In the clinic for the dying while willingly participating in an ill-conceived cultural trend” is the witty name of the chorus for a section that reads like an origin story and confirms Coral’s lesbian identity.

The speed with which Blackburn moves through these sections is dazzling, engrossing, and profoundly lifelike. Even as this book makes us laugh, it knows it has opened a window, a small one, between that expulsion of air and the knowledge that we all live in a world of hard, inescapable truths. Some of us can handle that knowledge better than others. Some of us just can’t. The way Blackburn acknowledges that this diversity can exist in one person is perhaps the most dazzling aspect of all.•

Join Blackburn on July 25 at 5 p.m. Pacific Time as he sits down with CBC anchor John Freeman and a special guest Myriam Gurba discuss Dead in Long Beach, California. Register for the Zoom call Here.

John Freeman is host of the California Book Club and editor of Freeman’swhose final topic is Conclusions, will be published this autumn. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story And Freeman’s and senior editor at Knopf. His latest book is Wind, trees. He lives in New York.