Ellie

Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn, over the past 2 weeks, has become our favorite novel of the year. And while it’s still early in the year, we’re fairly confident that it will remain so (or at least high up there). When going into the book, we knew 3 things: 1) The book follows a woman named Coral, 2) The book begins with Coral finding her brother dead from suicide, and 3) The book has a first-person plural (we) point of view/narration. When we got into it, we were surprised by just how plural (in the sense of multiplicity) the novel is, and while the narration style might seem to imply that, there’s so much more.

To begin, a small synopsis of the novel: We begin the novel with being told that Coral has just discovered her brother, Jay, dead by suicide, with no note. She predictably falls into grief, and when her brother’s phone rings with a text from her niece Khadija, she answers, pretending to be Jay, because of being overwhelmed. Over the course of the next week, which is the scope of the novel, Coral digs herself deeper, impersonating her dead brother, and even making new social media accounts for him. She also tries to go about her normal life, while grieving heavily and being profoundly alone. As the week continues, she falls further into unhealthy coping mechanisms and continues losing her grip with reality. At the end of the week, the next Friday, the whole ruse falls apart, and the novel ends with her confronting / being confronted by her niece at Jay’s home.

As for the novel’s structure, it’s split into what I call “chapters” (self-explanatory, I hope) and “frames”. These “frames” resemble different points-of-view, but I won’t be using that term, since I want to focus on things being plural. Additionally these frames intertwine with each other inside a single chapter or even page. The novel has four such frames: 1) The present-day, 2) Certain events in Coral’s past, 3) The Narrators, who call themselves librarians, talking about themselves, and 4) Excerpts from Coral’s book: Wildfire. Of these four, the Wildfire excerpts are the most set off, having a header of the book's name and author (Coral E. Brown). After this, the flashbacks additionally sometimes, but not always, have a header of the place and time at the beginning. Otherwise, all the others are intertwined from paragraph to paragraph. And, in general, it’s very impressive how tonally consistent they are, even to the point where we sometimes didn’t consciously recognize the shift.

While the novel follows Coral, she is not the narrator. Throughout the novel, we mostly only get the point of view of the librarians. The one exception is the first chapter, where the librarians convey Coral’s thoughts to us. Here, and any time later when someone speaks, it’s all in italics. These librarians are presented as a collective of individuals who are tasked, possibly by themselves, to catalog and organize all remaining data from humans after an apocalypse. Early on, near the end of the first chapter, we learn that these librarians also narrate Wildfire, and were created by Coral for that book. Wildfire, in contrast to the rest of the novel, follows a lesbian assassin, whose name is redacted (left only as underscores) throughout the entirety of the excerpts, just a little while before the end of the world, and thus before the librarians came into existence.

The librarians, while focusing on Coral, will occasionally talk about themselves. Very often, when doing this, they will start an anecdote, usually lasting no longer than a paragraph, with a specific formula: In the Clinic for [X], we…. The specific clinic name changes throughout the novel, but usually stays fairly consistent within a specific chapter. At first, the connection between these anecdotes is fairly obscure, but as the novel continues, it becomes increasingly clear these anecdotes are mostly memories of Coral’s. The first time we recognized this was on page 106: “In the Clinic for Dying While Willfully Participating in a Poorly Thought-Out Cultural Trend and Becoming a Martyr for Revolution, we ride in the passenger seats of cars. These cars are driven by people we love and are supposed to love but have a hard time finding the right frame of mind to do so. Our brother is in the driver’s seat and our niece is in the back. She is fourteen and we have told her we are lesbian and she nods like an old woman. We tell her to tell her father. We are cowards, and we are cunning. The conversation is awkward and Jay turns up the music and pulls into Tam’s Burgers and orders a #2 with a Coke. We know to wait. We do not look at our niece, her breathing and shifting and silence. The person on the other end of the drive-thru speaker mentions ketchup and our brother says, What. They repeat, Ketchup. Our brother again says, What, what, what?” Notably, in a previous flashback, we learned of a time that Coral, Jay, and Khadija all went to Tam’s Burgers; this seems to prove, or at least heavily suggest, that the librarians are Coral.

These anecdotes only become more and more clearly Coral’s, and move up through time and eventually catch up to the present. For example, in the final chapter, while Coral walks through a dog shelter, while trying to avoid confronting Khadija, we get this: “In the Clinic for Outrageous Disguises That Cloak All Evidence of Frailty, Loneliness, and Terror, we have phobias. We do not conquer our phobias at appropriate moments. We are afraid of dogs and walk through shelters. The cages give us confidence, but we trust the cages only as much as we trust the people that have the keys and turn the locks. Those people seem like idiots. Fear is not a thing to conquer in one evening at a no-kill animal shelter with great marketing and poor actual maintenance. Fear is a thing to drown in other priorities” (p. 213–214). This just mirrors Coral’s actual present moment basically to the letter, and is only told through a different person’s viewpoint.

Now that we can see that Coral and the librarians are likely the same, here’s where plurality comes in. I believe this to be plural because the names of the “Clinic”s represent different coping mechanisms. Given that the librarians are, and yet aren’t Coral, these Clinics and thus coping mechanisms then read as a job that an alter/headmate might be carrying out because the fronter cannot or will not. Especially striking, to me at least, was the “Clinic for Excavating Repressed Memories in Search of Solutions to Current Crises”.

We also know that Coral, through the anecdotes relayed by the librarians, has dealt with a lot of trauma through her life, and has also just been dealt another traumatic event, that of her brother’s sudden suicide. It’s definitely possible that Coral has developed a dissociative disorder and/or plurality due to this history. Relatedly, the librarians are also a character in Coral’s own novel, and it’s quite possible that the stress of finding her dead brother lead her to introject the librarians. This reading would, in my opinion, make the beginning lines of the book—“We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot. She just discovered her brother dead in his apartment. Suicide.”—make even more sense.

The novel’s own structure also mirrors plurality, in my opinion. Each of the 4 frames are separate yet intertwined. Together, they form a cohesive whole, that of a story of a woman whose life shatters in an instant and follows her for a week where she reckons with this. Despite all their differences, each frame is tonally consistent with the other, and each of the four has obvious connections to the others. While I did not focus on the Wildfire sections here, we can know that they are connected because one of the excerpts, instead of listing Coral’s name, has a blank set of underscores, which is identical to how the protagonist of Wildfire is designated throughout. The said protagonist and Coral also have other similarities. That the Wildfire segments are connected to the chapters they’re in seems obvious to me, but exactly how still eludes me, so I elected to mostly not talk about them as they’re not as important to the plural reading of the novel, in my opinion. Despite this, we could argue that the protagonist of Wildfire is another part of Coral as well, given what I mentioned earlier about Coral’s name being replaced.