Venita Blackburn, Dead in Long Beach, California, Alta’s California Book Club's July book

Venita Blackburn’s Dead in Long Beach, California has made me think (again but also in new ways) about how we deliberately and accidentally splinter our consciousness in the face of the unbearable. I wrote about the book for Alta’s California Book Club: I am wild about the books they choose and the smart, great essays people post and the wonderful live Zoom conversations. Also, I count myself very lucky to keep learning from Anita Felicelli, brilliant writer and brilliant, respectful editor. Here’s the beginning of my piece about the book:

In Venita Blackburn’s original, fierce first novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, Coral E. Brown, a graphic sci-fi novelist, finds her brother dead by suicide and splinters into separate selves. As she fends off grief and horror, the futuristic machines she’s invented to narrate her own novel step in to tell the story with tender, wry curiosity about humanity. As these machines say from the start, “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.” Of course, since the machines are her creation, she is telling the story, but obliquely, as a novelist does. They investigate her deep past and family and report on her thoughts and actions after her brother’s death. They draw conclusions about human relationships to destructiveness, debt, desire, minor fame, avoidance, denial, fan fic, and the devastating, insatiable human craving for “More.”

As the novel opens, Coral stands by while the EMTs deal with the body of her brother, Jay, her train of thought already unrolling into the machines’ analyses. Her brother’s phone “ding[s] and vibrate[s] like something hungry.” A message from her niece, Jay’s daughter, Khadija, postponing a family dinner: the phone is unlocked, and Coral reads it. Something simmers in her so that when she comes home from the hospital at midnight, full of rage-grief and questions about his life, she begins to search through his other text messages. He has only 30 contacts, which increases her fury at him. Even before his death, she was the only one in touch with other family members and the one who had to make all the arrangements and pay for family funerals. Now she will have to notify everyone of his death. In the middle of a long rant, aloud, to herself, she says, “I’m not some kind gay nun with a credit card. I have shit to do. Now I have to be the middleman in the family because you never talk to anybody.”

You can read the rest here. Alta’s site also has an excerpt from the novel, other essays about the book, and, as always, a reflective essay by the author (Blackburn writes beautifully about ghosts).

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about previous MPP pieces about characters trying to come to grips with (or evade) terrible realities, including Charles Baxter on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers: Not Understanding and on his own newest novel, The Sun Collective. Here’s a passage from that essay (and you can read the rest at the link):

I suppose peacefulness, calm, and bliss are to be welcomed. Literature almost but not quite promises that it can advise you on how to achieve those treasured moments of peace of mind. You are in possession of these qualities? Good for you. God bless you—or has blessed you. But in one paragraph of Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers, a paragraph that I go back to over and over again, Ivan Karamazov refuses all that. When it comes to the suffering of children, he says, there is nothing to understand; there is no way to put such suffering into perspective; there is no “answer” to it; and if some global, philosophical, political, or religious explanation is offered to justify or to explain away the suffering of children, Ivan refuses it. In the chapter titled “Rebellion” (sometimes translated as “Mutiny”), Ivan disclaims all that. 

“‘I understand nothing, and now,’ Ivan went on as if delirious, ‘I don’t want to understand anything. I want to stick to facts. I gave up trying to understand long ago. As soon as I feel I want to understand something I immediately have to renounce facts, whereas I have decided to stay true to facts…” (Ignat Avsey translation) 

And I wrote earlier about another couple of inventive, deeply influential books that take on personal and societal extremity: Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, and Jenny Offill, Weather: Imagining the Future.

Virtual Events

Alta’s California Book Club: Venita Blackburn will read and talk with John Freeman (so nuanced and remarkable at writerly conversations) on Thursday July 25 (fourth Thursday, not third, this month), at 5 pm PT. Here’s the link to register. I will hope to “see” you there…it’s a webinar, but there’s a chat.

The very enticing 2024 Yetzirah Jewish Poetry Conference is happening right now (like right now! July 2-5). Here’s the link to their public, virtual events.

Lit Youngstown: Uplifting Black Women’s Voices. Another enticing event, with previous MPP author Mary M. Slechta with Lesley Nneka Arimah, Teri Ellen Cross Davis, and Kortney Morrow, Thursday, July 11 at 4:00 pm PT. “This reading will be livestreamed via YouTube. To join, visit Lit Youngstown's YouTube Channel, and click on the "Live" tab.”

(Dear MPP readers, I’m starting to include a selection of upcoming virtual events, so if you know of a great upcoming (virtual only!) event, or even want to link to an event recording, please include it in the comments. And yes, you can absolutely include your own virtual events! Also, we’re interested in anything else you have to say about the books or the MPP pieces—I get wonderful emails from friends and readers about them: I always wish I could share them with you all. So if you want to post some of these thoughts for each other, I know other people would be very intrigued to read them.)