A sui generis, sometimes woolly exploration of the complexity and long reach of racism.
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 Division itself, 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.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982174-82-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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