Posing as her dead brother is just part of grieving process

There may be no right or wrong way to grieve, but impersonating a recently departed loved one could get a person in trouble. To be fair, Coral — the protagonist of Venita Blackburn’s first novel, “Dead in Long Beach, California” — doesn’t exactly mean to pick up her brother Jay’s phone and start texting as him after she finds him dead from suicide in his apartment. It’s just something she does … and keeps doing.

Over the next few days, Coral shows up for her day job, honors her scheduled appearances as the author of a science fiction graphic novel, sets up dates on her own phone and keeps up with Jay’s texts on his. Coral understands that what she’s doing is “at worst a kind of crime and at best an infraction of decency,” but it’s surely better than telling Jay’s loved ones, especially his daughter, Khadija, that he is dead. But as Coral sustains the illusion that Jay’s life is intact, her life unravels. The prolonged, intensifying strain that she creates by maintaining this deceit becomes the novel’s central problem.

Blackburn has previously written two story collections, both of which displayed her genius for compression and formal invention. While this new book shows her moving to more spacious realms, it’s built with the same meticulous craftsmanship of her shorter works. Her sentences zing with lively precision — Coral’s hunger “flickered like dead flint”; her unraveling is a ball of yarn “thrown up to the sky in an act of delirium or prayer” — even as she tackles the thorny complexity of mourning.

If speaking for the dead is an ethical quandary, it’s also a way to love someone. In taking on Jay’s texts, Coral becomes his medium, his voice.

Through that evolution, she becomes newly aware of how profoundly different their lives have been, and though he is now dead, she’s eager to boost his legacy. But Coral, who is queer, finds herself angry at Jay, at his friends and at male culture in general for promoting isolation and stolidness as opposed to, say, community and emotional support.

Coral impersonating Jay isn’t the only perspective play in the novel. The story is narrated in first- person plural by a chorus of Coral’s science fiction characters. They describe themselves as “machine librarians,” imported from the future, a kind of artificial intelligence tasked with studying humans in the wake of a global catastrophic event. They are Coral’s support. “We are responsible for telling this story,” they tell us, “mostly because Coral cannot” — she’s too disassociated.

And so, just as Coral inhabits Jay, the librarians inhabit her. They trawl her memories and stage flashbacks of her life as part of their study. These flashbacks — which capture some of the big and small moments that have shaped Coral’s and Jay’s lives — are among the most poignant scenes of the book, gesturing at the siblings’ long history of knowing, showing up for and sometimes failing each other. While the librarians’ neutral, inquisitive perspective often has the effect of muting Coral’s grief, these scenes are vivid with feeling. But the librarians’ motives are not selfless, it turns out: Their inquiry into the siblings’ lives feeds their own archival records as they seek to understand the human proclivity for self- destruction.

They get no easy answers, and neither do we. “Dead in Long Beach, California” emphasizes not the why of Jay’s suicide but its painful, bewildering aftermath, aptly explored through a perspective that estranges.

Told by machines from the future, Blackburn’s idiosyncratic grief novel is as freshly devastating as they come.