Reality and justification in “Dead in Long Beach, California”

“The thing known as the internet has lost its imagination and cannibalized itself,” we are told before hitting “Top Stories 2021 Sunday, 1:05 p.m.” Disturbing headlines like “NINE-YEAR-OLD MASS SHOOTING SURVIVOR TESTIFIES BEFORE CONGRESS” and “A GENERATION OF MEN DON’T WANT TO HAVE SEX AND ARE WILLING TO KILL TO MAKE IT OK” sound both familiar and otherworldly. You feel the lifelike lifelessness of media shaped by algorithms, clickbait, and websites without editors. These headlines are examples of the absurdity of the world Coral scrolls through. Readers will identify with her rewriting of reality. Her extreme sense that a detail is too exaggerated for the present but entirely plausible in a possible tomorrow.

Also tied into the internet’s reality distortion and its disruption of the social self is the unleashing of gender – evident in Coral’s projections onto others as they maneuver their respective gender expectations. At times, Coral seems jealous of the low expectations placed on her deceased brother (like “men don’t think about that crap,” how she’s “better than (her) brother and still alone”). Actions she questions in her niece Khadija, like Khadija speaking “with two voices,” betray what Coral considers respectable behavior. While Coral misinterprets this duality, as a young teenager doing anything to satisfy her “craving for more,” there might be a more generous interpretation: “They say trauma lives in voices,” our narrator tells us, and later, “We believe all voices are permanent records of damage.” Any moral charge against Coral’s death doesn’t hold water: We see Coral take on other voices and lie for seven days. Like Khadija, Coral expands her reality beyond her own limits, fighting for more control. And maybe that’s a kind of freedom in these circumstances. For a queer woman. For a young black girl in a world that can demand so much of you. It’s safe to assume that Coral’s forays into Jay’s persona—his phone, his social media accounts—are also ventriloquism, a fanfiction that tests the limits of different gender expectations. A new chance to survive life.

The novel’s transcendent achievement becomes clear over time, not only through what is said, but also through WHO it might say. “We say a lot of things that aren’t really true. We’re not saying that every death is different, every goodbye tears in new and unpredictable ways, and the pain is never exactly the same,” our narrators tell us. (On the circumstances of Jay’s death, the book is sparse, seemingly without pontificates about death by suicide. It is a facet of humanity with its own ripple effects, similar and unlike other deaths, the work suggests.) The collective “we” at the beginning of the book feels palpably alien at first, like a futuristic group of cyborg children: “We are students of their time, of this time, and as students we practice the known… with reckless disregard for things like pain or worse.” Later, the collective reads much less alien: an alternate voice and self for Coral, fiction as a cover. Omniscient insofar as any being can know and reflect humanity itself, can imagine the truths of another person or collective. What felt impossibly prophetic and futuristic is actually just the experience of life. An existential reorientation. A stitching together of the various selves, choices and impulses – lived and desired. Wading through new clarities to find a new, more positive distance. A second self. This novel is a brilliant work. Venita Blackburn tells the truth.•

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

Steffan Triplett is associate director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics and author of the forthcoming Bad prognosis (Essay Press).