The Residue Years
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Winner Whiting Writers' Award Winner Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction Finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Mitchell S. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America's whitest city, Portland, Oregon. In the '90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem. In his commanding autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a break-out voice that's nothing less than extraordinary. The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace. Grace is just out of a drug treatment program, trying to stay clean and get her kids back. Champ is trying to do right by his mom and younger brothers, and dreams of reclaiming the only home he and his family have ever shared. But selling crack is the only sure way he knows to achieve his dream. In this world of few options and little opportunity, where love is your strength and your weakness, this family fights for family and against what tears one apart. Honest in its portrayal, with cadences that dazzle, The Residue Years signals the arrival of a writer set to awe.
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3.5 stars? This is a challenging read, for many, many reasons, and took me some time to start getting used to it and really be able to take it all in.
The ending is set in place from the beginning. This is the bitter, harsh reality of real life. The reader watches as the inevitable happens, horrified but unable to look away. Set in Portland in the US state of Oregon, Grace is an addict trying to remain sober, while her eldest son Champ becomes a dealer to make a living, feeling he has no other choice with the cards he's been dealt. The bond between these two is so strong and special, and that makes it all the more heartbreaking when things gradually full apart. Perhaps it was always the hardest to see how Grace could remain sober and get back her younger sons; the passages detailing what she is up against are harrowing:
It's like lightning, like love, like the cure. And if you haven't felt it you can't judge—or at least shouldn't. If you haven't felt it, how could you ever really know what us addicts, us experts, are up against in this life of programs and counselors and sponsors, what we face because of or in spite of our earned expertise?[...]They say and they say and it sounds so easy, as if living clean is no more than hitting the right switch, as if it takes something less than heroics to face history dead-on, to accept the life we've earned.
Say it first and believe it second; that's my psalm.
