Long Division {original}

Citoyen "City" Coldson is a black teenager in Mississippi dealing with racism and the difficulties of adolescence. But he also seems to be... a character in a book he's reading? Maybe a book that he himself wrote? One that involves time travel, and other kinds of strangeness.

The novel's depiction of and commentary on racism and the way it affects people is pointed and painful and often very well done. Everything else about it... Man, I don't even know. It's weird, because I'm perfectly comfortable with time travel stories, and I'm okay with magic realism, and well practiced in believing six impossible things before breakfast. But the strangeness in this book... I just never really felt like I had a handle on it, never felt like it quite show more made sense to me, even on its own terms. Maybe that's the book, maybe that's me, I don't know. I did notice, when I was nearly finished with it, that there was a blurb on the back comparing Laymon to Murakami, which suddenly reminded me that I felt a very similar can't-quite-find-my-footing feeling with the one Murakami novel I've read, Kafka on the Shore. Although I found that one more interesting than frustrating, in the end, and I'm not sure I feel that way about this one.

Rating: This is a hard one to rate. The aspects of it that worked for me worked really well, and I want to give it credit for that, but mostly I'm left with this unsatisfied what-the-hell-did-I-just-read? feeling. Let's go with 3/5. show less

All things considered, you have to love a book with a "dynamic" sentence like "I guess you should also know that LaVander Peeler smells so good that sometimes you can't help but wonder if a small beast farted in your mouth when you're too close to him." I googled it because I didn't believe it original--it had to be part of some slang I was unfamiliar with--but the only hit was from this book. Or a sentence like "LaVander Peeler invented saying “Kindly pause” in the bathroom last year at the end of eighth grade. If you were pissing and another dude just walked in the bathroom and you wondered who was walking in the bathroom, or if you walked in the bathroom and just looked a little bit toward a dude already at a urinal, you had to show more say “Kindly pause." Or maybe, "They just renovated the bathrooms for the first time in fifteen years and these rectangular tiles behind the urinal are now this deep dark blue that make you know that falling down and floating up are the same thing, even if you have severe bubble guts or constipation."

I like knowing that there's someplace in the world where people talk to each other the way they do in this novel but then I keep thinking that there are many such places but I am just too out of touch to be acquainted with them. After all, I had trouble following some of the turns of plot as well, or even knowing which year it was.

And sometimes I felt things were over-explained and over explicit, like the multiple choice test near the end, though it was a school environment so it made sense as well. But now I think this is because it's a first novel and Mr. Laymon was just finding his way.

Unlike some other Goodreads reviewers, I liked the time travel element, but maybe this is because unlike most of them, I was alive in 1964.

So to sum up (like one learns to do at school at the end of a review, say) there was a lot of powerful stuff going on in this book and though it never all came together for me, I appreciated what the author had accomplished with individual scenes, characters and relationships. And dynamic sentences. show less

Oh what a refreshing gem this is. I love the humor, the characters, the writing is so full of life. Full full full. It gets a bit confusing with the time travel, and ends up seeming like the hand drawing a hand drawing, if I'm reading it as well as I hope I did. I feel like I missed so much though! The ending all but tells you to start the book over again, if only I had the time, but unless I start it again right away I don't think I could figure it out better than I already have. I can't really think about it without feeling my brain is broke. It's well worth the read anyway just for the writing style, even if you can't figure out this puzzle. I could probably think about this book for hours and never figure it out. I've got some show more questions! I can't tell if Laymon wrote the book intentionally vague or if I'm lacking some brain cells...so the book could probably be polished a bit, lose some loose ends. I especially loved the laptop dance party in 1964 but each page is filled with good stuff. I love that the characters compete in a sentence competition, as Laymon could certainly win one of those. The humor stays throughout the book, even when it gets confusing and sad. This book sure has HEART. I even had a dream that I was in the book with the characters. This reminds me of Mark Twain, Ralph Ellison, Victor LaValle and Haruki Murakami. If it wasn't for the Tournament of Books, I might not have found this one. A sad pairing in the ToB for this book to be against The Goldfinch. I feel like The Goldfinch was written a billion times before, but Long Division is the fresh beating heart of future books.... I will definitely be keeping an eye out for Laymon's writing in the future. Man, I need a drank. show less

This book is really amazing, but not totally effective. I read it because I loved Laymon's memoir, Heavy, and his writing in this is also as precise, his thoughts as deep, and his creativity as complete. But it seemed overly ambitious, covering a multitude of themes, and not ultimately seeming totally coherent. The fact that I still liked it as much as I did is proof that I'm a fan. And I will be reading whatever he writes in the future!

This was a trip from beginning to end. I legitimately think it's an extremely strong four star book, but the fact that it's completely different from anything else I've been reading punches it out extra. It's a time travel novel (although not particularly science fiction-y, there isn't anything about how the time travel works, exactly), starting off with teenagers in 2013 post-Katrina rural Mississippi. (I think it's rural, I know nothing about Mississippi, there seemed to be a lot of woods) In addition to the time travel, you've a book-within-a-book story, featuring some of the same characters in various times. The humor was hitting me exactly right, too.

I confess that, as usual, I struggled to keep up with exactly what thread was show more playing out in what way in what timeline, but that's definitely a problem I have often so I assume it's me. I mean, the broad strokes were clear, it's more like there were some details I know I fuzzed out a bit.

It's not perfect, the tone oddly shifts around a bit and I'm not sure that was working for me, but overall, this book was hard to put down and whenever I had to, I found myself thinking about it a lot. show less

Originally, I was going to rate this a little lower – again, due to my own frustration at not quite grasping the what of it all. But as with the excellent mindfrak of a film Primer, I’m not sure you can know this book on one reading. Unfortunately, I’m guessing I probably won’t get a chance to crack it again (the pace of modern life, am I right?) – at least not for a while… but I find myself haunted as though in a dream by aspects of the book. Hazy confusions, unexpectedly clear images, thoughts about the interconnectivity of the books within books…. One thing is for sure: Kiese Laymon might’ve passed me by if it wasn’t for the ToB – but he’s unmistakably on my radar now.


More at RB: show more target="_top">http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2014/02/01/long-division/
and
at TNBBC: http://thenextbestbookblog.blogspot.com/2014/01/drew-reviews-long-division.html show less

I think this is the first time I've liked a book and quit on it anyway about a third of the way through - twice. It has a nice, light satirical touch - not as frenetic as The Sellout, but just as effective. I liked that the characters are all in their early teens, so even when they're snarky there's still childlike sweetness about them. And if the publishers description of the book as "Twain-esque" means that City Coldson is a kind of black, hip-hop Tom Sawyer, I can see that. I think I quit (twice) because the plot just didn't have enough juice to keep me going. On paper the story sounds entertaining - time travel, a mysterious disappearance, and a strange book that ties it all together - but at the one third mark, I felt like the book show more had given me all it had to give. I think this book would make a fantastic graphic novel though. Maybe that was my problem - it read like a graphic novel, but without the pictures. show less