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When picking a backdrop for tales of inner-city struggle, authors often end up in New York or Chicago. For his debut novel, The Residue Years (Bloomsbury, 352 pages, $17), which is set amid the mid-'90s crack epidemic, Mitchell S. Jackson instead chose a neglected black community in America's whitest city and his hometown—Portland.
Jackson's autobiographical novel, which got rave reviews upon its initial publication in 2013 and is now the Multnomah County Library's "Everybody Reads" selection for 2015, rotates between the first-person perspectives of Champ and Grace. Champ is a young man attempting to use his limited resources—legal and otherwise— to achieve his family's American dream. His mother, Grace, is a recovering addict struggling to keep clean and build a future despite the strict limitations of someone spat out by the legal system.
Jackson is great with language, delivering poetic prose drawn from black vernacular. Save for a few exceptions, Jackson spells slang terms in the "proper," traditional sense, sparing us the Twainian transcription of urban dialect so often applied to black speech. It's an effective choice in making sure the characters aren't seen as caricatures. The cost, though, is that reading harsh consonants in certain contexts is jarring, and can momentarily distract from the story.
For Portland residents, there's the added bonus of reading a book set in your own backyard, the thrill of reading about the characters visiting Irving Park or driving up 7th Avenue on their way through Northeast. When Jackson describes certain neighborhoods, though, it's as they were before being remodeled through a wave of whitewashing and gentrification, which adds a tension, contrasting the readers' contemporary memory to the author's outdated description. It often seems a reminder that Portland's development has fixed up neighborhoods without bettering the people who once called them home.
With a perspective rarely seen in such praised literature, The Residue Years
is a captivating book with a poetic style that, despite the city's
alleged openness to diversity, represents a voice rarely heard in
Portland. With strong themes like familial struggle, institutionalism,
and choice in the face of limited options, readers should connect with
the story in some way. If you haven't read it, the library is
well-stocked with copies.
GO: Multnomah County Library branches are holding discussions of The Residue Years throughout February. Mitchell S. Jackson speaks at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, on Tuesday, March 10. 7:30 pm. $15-$65. See literary-arts.org for more information.
WWeek 2015