Book #169 of 2022:
Long Division by Kiese Laymon
This 2013 authorial debut has some interesting ideas and a distinctive voice for its protagonist(s), but it strikes me as overall too jumbled and underdeveloped to land with much impact. The plot, as I understand it: a young Black teen in the modern age, struggling with potential queer feelings for his school rival / friend and having recently gone viral for calling out the racism of a spelling bee-like competition that kept giving students of color words that would be uncomfortable or stereotypical for them to repeat, stumbles across a book called Long Division. In it he finds the story of a boy with his same name in 1985, who winds up time-traveling to 2013, where he meets a girl who turns out to be his future daughter. She has the same name as a neighbor who’s gone missing in the reader’s reality… as well as a copy of a book called Long Division about a kid with his name going viral on the internet and so on. Later they go back to 1964 to try to save his grandfather from being lynched by the KKK.
The narrative alternates back and forth between these two people who are each fictional to one another, with context clues generally helping to identify the switch, but not always right away. It’s all a bit chaotic and unclear, especially for so short a novel (276 pages in paperback), and none of the characters ever seem to react to the patently weird stuff happening around them with anything but matter-of-fact disinterest. There’s a lot of unchallenged antisemitism, fatphobia, and homophobia including slurs, along with bizarre throwaway details like one of the heroes meeting a talking cat or the fact that his counterpart once pleasured himself while thinking about his grandmother. The whole project is frankly a mess, and often feels like an attempt to be provocative without necessarily demonstrating the substance or discipline to channel the ensuing attention productively.
I know that author Kiese Laymon’s more recent memoir Heavy has attracted rave reviews, and perhaps I should have started there. He’s still speaking from a specific southern Black perspective in this earlier work, but those #ownvoices insights are somewhat lost in the delivery.
[Content warning for gun violence, domestic abuse, and gore.]
★★☆☆☆
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