The Long Division

by Derek Nikitas

An Atlanta house cleaner flees her life to reunite with the son she gave up for adoption. The teenage boy joins his mother on an unlawful road trip that proves how much they both have to lose by finding each other. Elsewhere, a deputy must track down the shooter in a drug related double murder.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312363982
• ISBN13: 9780312363987
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.5" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

A worthy follwer to PYRES.

Some writers are worth reading for their prose alone. Or for their plots. But Derek Nikitas tells complicated, heart rending stories that stay with you for weeks afterward and tells them beautifully. A woman seizes a sudden opportunity to find the son she gave away--this is just one of the threads that wind through THE LONG DIVISION. If you're looking for a story with depth to it AND lovely writing, you'll find it here. Writers like Nikitas are elevating crime fiction writing to new heights because they are interested in more than whoduunit.

"Lifetimes of Vertigo"

Make no mistake about it - Derek Nikitas is a brilliant stylist - an original emerging talent who twists and warps his prose with the atmospherics of Faulkner, the quirkiness of McCarthy, but matched with a readability that neither of these venerable giants can match. For my money, his debut, "Pyres", was the book of the year. But having said that - holy smokes! - if there has ever been a more dark, depressing, and downbeat novel than "The Long Division", I don't remember it. This is "The Road" without an apocalypse, or "Fight Club" reading like Nora Roberts pabulum by comparison. "The Long Division" is the tale of a half-a-dozen or so fatalistically flawed characters, starting with Atlanta maid Jodie Larkin, heading north with stolen cash and a stolen car, and her 15 year old estranged and agreeably kidnapped son, Calvin, in tow. Seeking Calvin's biological father, Jodie and Cal travel to the desolate frozen wastelands of western New York, a cold setting especially fitting for the dark subject matter. Here we encounter deputy Sam Hartwick, is arguably the most normal of the cast, though hardly the hero. Enter Wynn Johnson, local SUNY student and mathematics savant, who ends up on the wrong end of murder and a stream of vengeful antagonists on both sides of the law, including the haunted deputy Sam. From this already sordid background, the plot spirals even deeper, penetrating the depths of humanity across a wide range of despair, a "search without a solution" across a tortured landscape of theft, murder, sexual identity, terminal cancer, and suicide. Yeah, well, did I say it was pretty? But it is powerful. Nikitas landscapes are "tall houses crammed at close quarters like mourners at a funeral." While upstate New York's hostile winter "...wind rocked the car like a gang of vandals..." with "rusted fire escapes and empty clotheslines like stripped umbrellas." Sweet. So like I said, Nikitas can write, but be forewarned: this guy is the master conductor of the train wreck of human carnage - an extraordinary writer who practices his craft in teen angst and wasted lives - the perfect stand-in should Styx farrier Charon need a day off. If you're looking for an upbeat story, you're on the wrong page. But for an exciting new benchmark in American literature, make sure Derek Nikitas is on your short list.

"She wondered whose reckoning this was and when the mercy would start."

One moment, one impulsive action and events are set in motion that result in a final, terrible reckoning. Jodie Larkin, a lonely housecleaner, grabs a stack of hundred dollar bills from a home where she is working. Thus begins a journey that will take her from Atlanta to Philadelphia to Weymouth, New York in a hapless trail of mistakes and misjudgments. Like the other wounded characters in this compelling novel, Jodie is running on instinct and desperation- in her case towards the son she gave up for adoption fifteen years ago. Meanwhile, in Weymouth, New York, Deputy Sam Hartwick, looks the other way and accepts a bribe as a favor to an estranged brother and sister. Wynn Johnston is along for the ride, a friend of the brother, in love with the sister, who has changed from childhood sweetheart to unrecognizable addict, the sweet memories of youth obliterated by drugs. An emotion-sparked moment, gunfire rings, brother and sister are dead, Wynn escaping the filthy trailer along with the druggies. Now Wynn has vengeance on his mind and memories on his heart. Wynn, a student and mathematics major at SUNY retreats to the comfort of formulas as his world spirals out of control, the author perfectly capturing the young man's distress as well as Jodie's urgency to meet her son, Calvin. Calvin has his own troubles, easily seduced by his mother into running away, perhaps to meet the father he has never known. All of Nikitas's characters are etched in misery, from Jodie's bumbling attempt to bond with Calvin to Deputy Hartwick's beleaguered family, facing a challenge none of them can bear and Wynn's abject confusion in the face of painful loss. All are caught in a jerky dance that propels them towards one another by way of a stolen vehicle, stolen son and finally stolen moments as the pushers rage in defense of territory, bullets flying, bodies falling. Law enforcement plods nearer vital connections and a final, tragic confrontation on Hartwick's frozen front lawn in Weymouth. The author embraces six degrees of separation, twining people and events in a drama that is striking and driven. Jodie and Calvin forge tentative bonds, guilt intrudes and fate conspires, the two stumbling towards the only place left to go. One cannot help but feel compassion for Jodie, Calvin, Wynn, Sam and his extraordinary wife, Jill, the gun-wielding drug dealers a reminder that Sam has made a serious mistake in judgment, Wynn compounding the danger. As fraught with faults as any real-life protagonists, this gallery of souls in need of a mercy is particularly compelling, all fighting to survive an indifferent world, past mistakes rising like a phoenix, demanding resolution, the ties of family sundered and repaired, dreams shattered in a moment of final, heartbreaking violence. Nikitas is a masterful puppeteer, his characters flying from present to past to present in a drama that reads like a Greek tragedy, devastating and memorable. Luan Gaines/2009.