Long Way Down

Long Way Down, by Jason Reynolds, is a highly original novel in verse. It is clever, artful, provocative, and desperately important.

Original: The story takes place in a single elevator trip from the eighth floor to the lobby of Will’s apartment building. The backstory is filled out in fragments as each new rider enters the elevator, each a significant person from Will’s past, each dead. By the time he reaches the ground floor he shares the elevator with six cigarette-smoking ghosts. Dani, 6th floor, was killed by stray gunfire when just a child, eight years old. Uncle Mark, 5th, was killed by Gee. At least that’s what Mikey, Will’s father, 4th,  believed. Only after killing him in exchange, as necessitated by The Rules, did Mikey realize his mistake. He had little time to suffer guilt before he, too, was taken out by a bullet. Buck, 7th floor, was shot by Frick, 3rd, who became the target for Will’s older brother Shawn, 2nd. Now it is Will’s turn to follow The Rules. But first he must negotiate these ghostly encounters in the longest elevator ride of his life. Even the chapters go in descending order.

Clever: Will has a thing for anagrams that are sprinkled throughout the text. ALIVE=A VEIL. SCARE=CARES. COOL=LOCO. CINEMA=ICEMAN. (“Not sure/what an iceman is,/but it makes me think/of bad dudes.//Cold-blooded.”) Later: “I wish I knew/an anagram//for POSER.”

The grown-up ghost of Dani stirs adolescent desire in Will. “BUT THERE WAS A GHOST IN THE ELEVATOR/so,/no-/go./// PLUS/it’s hard to think about/kissing and killing/at the same time.” This is wordplay young readers will appreciate.

Hugging Uncle Mark in the elevator is strange, not just because his late uncle is a ghost but because he knew him in life only through his father’s memories: “AND YOU KNOW//it’s weird to know/a person you don’t know//and at the same time//not know/a person you know,//you know?”

Will is overcome when his Pop steps in the elevator and tells him the story of how he followed The Rules. “POP! POP! POP!” says Pop, imitating the sound of the gun he used. Good and bad, right and wrong get mixed up in that one word. Especially when Pop reveals that he shot the wrong guy. And even more when he takes the gun from his son’s back pocket and presses its barrel to his face. “First time I had been that/close to death. To the end.//And at the hand of/Pop. Pop? Pop!”

Artful: Will’s anguish over Shawn’s death is the central driver of the book’s plot. Reynolds gives his readers a feel for the substance of the brothers’ relationship with a handful of seamlessly interwoven flashbacks. Early on, we see Shawn initiating Will into the mysteries of teenage life “with a spritz of his almost-grown cologne” so he can impress his girlfriend. She doesn’t like it, which, in Will’s telling to Shawn, leads to good-natured razzing and a headlock. In the next poem, Will realizes, “NOW THE COLOGNE/will never drop/lower in the bottles.//And I’ll never go to sleep again/believing//that touching them/or anything of his/will lead to an arm/around my neck.//But it feels like an arm/around my neck,/wrenching…,” knowing there will be no more such brotherly exchanges ever again.

A flashback in the final chapter, after Shawn’s second floor appearance, is even more striking. His dead brother is strangely, frighteningly not speaking to his younger brother, nor does he console him by hugging him back. This conjures a memory strikingly real in its quirky particularity. To get his older brother’s attention, Will would sometimes follow Shawn around, making a strange sound, “[l]ike burp mixed/with yawn mixed/with hum.” Shawn would ignore his unrelenting brother until he finally relented, then get back at him in his own merciless way: “To punish me,/he would wait for me to finish,/to run out of steam,/to let it go,/to get tired//of being immature.//And then,/to my surprise,/he wouldn’t say a word to me/for the rest/of the day.” In one brief scene, Reynolds has captured the poignancy of a sibling relationship–this sibling relationship. At the same time, he has raised the stakes of the current elevator encounter. We, as much as Will, are desperate for an answer to the question he wants his brother to help him answer: Is he doing the right thing in going after Riggs?

Provocative: The book asks us to consider the cycle of violence that plagues certain quarters of our country and not others. It forces those of us in the latter category to more fully consider the humanity of those in the former, the killers as well as the killed. Most of the characters in Reynolds novel are both, and they are sympathetic. Will, our first-person narrator, our guide to events, is about to cross the threshold to become a killer. The Rules dictate that he must. We see hints of both his determination and his hesitations, but he doesn’t break down until the second floor, when his unspeaking brother enters the elevator. He breaks down and breaks Rule No. 2: No Crying. But so  does Shawn, the one who taught him The Rules in the first place. Doubt looms large as the pages and poems dwindle. We readers want to know what Will will decide to do. Reynolds leaves no pat ending. When the door opens on the lobby, L, the ghosts depart with the cloud of smoke their cigarettes had created. Then: “Shawn/turned back toward me,/eyes dull from death/but shining from tears,//finally spoke/to me.//Just two words,/like a joke he’d/been saving.” We have to turn the page to see what they were: “YOU COMING?”

It took me a second read to really understand the question’s meaning: Are you going to go kill Riggs, get killed, and join us ghosts? The joking tone relieves tension as it brings the sibling relationship back to life, as it were. But the question’s import–Will the cycle of violence be perpetuated?–hangs sinisterly in the air for those able, and willing, to consider it.

Important: Jason Reynolds has courageously chosen to take on cyclical gun violence in this novel, a reality that truncates the lives and life prospects of too many in the urban, Black community. Though he never states the race of his characters directly, he makes clear in his blurb on the jacket that his intended audience is “young people who are tired of being invisible” and that his goal in writing is to help them “feel seen.” Nothing can be as important as getting this book into as many of these kids’ hands as possible. For young white readers, Reynold’s book might inoculate them against making the wrong inferences when they eventually encounter the term “black on black crime.

Reynolds, Jason. Long Way Down. New York: Athenaeum, 2017.