Two not-quite-parallel threads run through Laymon's meandering debut novel: the first, the story of young Mississippi high-schooler Citoyen, a.k.a. "City"; the second, chapters from a book he finds about a young Mississippi high-schooler of the same name, who, it seems, is him in a different time period. City is something of a typical inner-city teenage protagonist—sharp-witted and sharp-tongued, yet sensitive and observant—so his uncharacteristic outburst and the ensuing repercussions that give the novel its initial momentum seem implausible. The novel takes a fantastical turn, and occasionally Laymon's workings stand out a little too clearly. This selective adherence to the "rules" of writing happens on a larger scale: the novel within a novel goes unexplained—and unquestioned by City—for so long it's as though the author is ignoring his own subject matter to keep pages turning. Those trusting Laymon to provide answers will find a curious, enjoyable novel. However, readers who believe authors must address a text's pressing concerns as they make demands upon the reader—not when the author decides he wants to—will find this novel more trying. Though its real-world sections take relish in skewering the disingenuous masquerade of institutional racism, the book's interest in fantasy elements serves as an easier, less interesting, way out. (June)

A revised version of Laymon’s elliptical, time-folding work of metafiction about Southern racism... is effectively two novels, both potent yet often funny character studies. In style and structure, Laymon’s novel is an inheritor to Black postmodern literature of the 1960s and '70s—Toni Morrison most famously but also Leon Forrest, Gayl Jones, and William Melvin Kelley. A sui generis.”
—Kirkus

"Don't miss Kiese Laymon's Long Division. One Mississippi town with two engaging stories in two very different decades. The sharp humor and deep humanity make this debut novel unforgettable."
—Melissa Harris-Perry, MSNBC

"Funny, astute and searching.... The author's satirical instincts are excellent."
—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"With Long Division, Laymon gives us a story that embodies the ellipsis, the idea of an understood but unspoken beginning and ending. Narratives very rarely end; they go through edits and revisions. Characters are added and erased. For a book that begins with a grammar and language competition, Long Division fittingly ends with a statement about language, and that statement is that language, like history, never stops moving forward."
—Los Angeles Review of Books

"A little fantasy, a little mystery and a lot hilarious."
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"In a multilayered, allusion-packed, time-traveling plot set in Mississippi, Long Division takes us, nesting-doll-style, from 2013 to 1985, 1964, and back, engaging complex questions of race, violence, gender, sexuality, and our relationship to history. More than anything, Laymon shows with surprising lucidity how American racialized inequality is persistent but mutable, that the past is not the present, but isn’t, either, entirely past."
—The Boston Review

"Kiese Laymon is an amazing, courageous and brave novelist and essayist.... Laymon fiercely tackles issues of prejudice, adolescence and love with a swagger and confidence all his own. You rarely find novels this honest and engaging. Read this book."
—Michigan Quarterly Review

"Laymon’s voice is unique, a rarity in an era during which fiction tends all too often to chase trends.... At times touching, at times poignant, Laymon more than once strikes a beautiful chord in the midst of what often feels gritty and intentionally provocative. Those touching insights make Long Division worth the effort, and readers who stick with the story (stories, actually) will find themselves thinking about City and the people in his life long after they close the book."
—Chicago Book Review

"Long Division is a serious book about race and love with a thread of humor running through it, emerging largely from Laymon's wordplay and the cultural gaps that exist between characters from the past, present and future. With roots in Southern and African American literature, Long Division is an historical novel that touches on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and a work of magical realism in the tradtion of Haruki Murakami."
—Contemporary Literature

"A novel within a novel—hilarious, moving and occasionally dizzying.... Laymon cleverly interweaves his narrative threads and connects characters in surprising and seemingly impossible ways. Laymon moves us dazzlingly ... from 1964 to 1985 to 2013 and incorporates themes of prejudice, confusion and love rooted in an emphatically post-Katrina world."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Laymon’s debut novel is an ambitious mix of contemporary southern gothic with Murakamiesque magical realism ... the book elegantly showcases Laymon’s command of voice and storytelling skill in a tale that is at once dreamlike and concrete, personal and political."
—Booklist

"[One of] our best books of the year so far ... Layman’s debut novel is bursting with colloquial language from three generations of Mississippi African Americans, mixed with gut-piercing truths about a long racial divide that persists to this day."
—School Library Journal

"Smart and funny and sharp ... I loved it."
—Jesmyn Ward, author of Sing, Unburied, Sing

"[An] ambitious novel ... it is the most exciting book I’ve read all year. There’s nothing like it, both in terms of the scope of what the book tackles and the writing’s Afro Surrealist energy."
—Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women and Hunger

“Smart, exciting and energetic ... the language romps and roars along through some truly wonderful comic scenes and yet the book doesn’t hesitate to comment seriously on questions that matter to human beings everywhere, not just in rural Mississippi.”
—Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine and Slapboxing with Jesus

"Long Division finally gave me what I’ve wanted to see in contemporary southern literature. For years I’ve complained about no recent accounts of black southerners in American Literature. It goes down in southern rap – which we’ll get to in the following paragraphs – but in literary studies it’s always been the old guard: Hurston, Ellison, Wright, Gaines, and Alice Walker (I swear, if I read “Everyday Use” in one more class I’d quit life). Long Division basically told me 'sit down and shut the hell up. Here it is. Here’s what you wanted.'”
—Regina Bradley, author of Outkasted Conversations

"As if anything could be beyond what Laymon has done for race, temporality, geography, and the South—as well as for the real and transhistorical black southerner—there is also what Long Division does for questions of love, death, and dying. Across cities/Cities, there is the looming and encompassing quality of love that bends sexuality and familial boundaries."
—Zandria Robinson, author of This Ain't Chicago and Chocolate Cities

"Long Division is one of those books that I picked up and just couldn’t stop reading ... powerful, a classic American novel."
—Jeff Chang, author of Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post-Civil Rights America and We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

“Laymon is a brilliant young writer...this is a book that sings in the heart but challenges readers to take careful consideration of the power of memory. Like the best of Hurston, Ellison, or Bambara, Laymon’s craft flows on frequencies that both honor and extend the traditions those writers established.”
—William Henry Lewis, author of I Got Somebody in Staunton

“The racial/ethical awareness is as complex as Coetzee’s, and Laymon is just as good a writer. Laymon takes some real risks. I love the interplay of spirituality and sexuality. Nothing sounds forced, pandering or trendy. City, the husky citizen of the imagination, feels totally singular and totally representative. That’s tough to pull off.”
—Tim Strode, author of Ethics of Exile

"Laymon's debut novel is an ambitious mix of contemporary southern gothic with Murakamiesque magical realism." —Booklist

2021-05-05
A revised version of Laymon’s elliptical, time-folding work of metafiction about Southern racism.

The first novel by Laymon, initially published in 2013, is effectively two novels, both potent yet often funny character studies. In one, it’s 2013 and Citoyen, aka City, is a Mississippi high schooler vying to win a national title in the “Can You Use That Word in a Sentence” competition, a kind of spelling bee for syntax. City's onstage explosion (over the fraught, contentious word niggardly) goes viral, prompting him to escape to his grandmother’s home, where he pores over Long Division, a novel that purports to explain the recent, much-discussed disappearance of Baize, a local Black girl. City’s stint with his grandmother is marked by confrontations with racists and extreme payback against them as well as contemplations of racist language from the N-word on down. The novel’s second part is Long Divisionitself, in which City is a teenager in 1985 who, with the help of his friend Shalaya, finds a portal in the woods that sends them forward to 2013, where Baize is an aspiring rapper, and back to 1964, where he’s forced to confront the Ku Klux Klan. In style and structure, Laymon’s novel is an inheritor to Black postmodern literature of the 1960s and '70s—Toni Morrison most famously but also Leon Forrest, Gayl Jones, and William Melvin Kelley. And like many pomo works, the plotting gets convoluted as City attempts to untangle the various threads of his personal history. But the struggle is part of the point. Laymon wants to position his complicated hero as part of a throughline of violence against Blacks across decades, from microaggressions to lynching. City proclaims that the Long Division he’s reading is “about tomorrow and yesterday and the magic of love.” That’s also true, if obliquely, of the novel Laymon has written.

A sui generis, sometimes woolly exploration of the complexity and long reach of racism.