Survival Math

March 15, 2018

Ernest Gaines Prize-winning novelist Jackson (The Residue Years) here recounts his upbringing in the small black community of Portland, OR, a world defined by drugs, gangs, and jail time. Emblematic of a larger story.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 15, 2019
A dynamic, impressive debut memoir from the Whiting Award-winning author of The Residue Years (2013).Following his award-winning debut novel, Jackson (Writing/New York Univ.) looks back on the specific chaos of historical, cultural, and familial forces that, despite the continued presence of open wounds, allowed them a chance at redemption in their home of Portland, Oregon. As he writes, "there's the history that's hit the books, what for all time should live in its ledgers, but...I must keep alive the record of where we lived and how we lived and what we lived and died for," so it doesn't slip "into the ether." The author chronicles the complicated influences that have shaped his life, weaving through the Reaganomics era and its attendant uneven burden on black families, which led to expanding precariousness and subsequent street-scheming and entrenched pipe-dreaming. In his lyric memoir in essays, Jackson navigates family strife, crime, guns, toxic masculinity, substance abuse and addiction, and the meaning of "hustle," among countless other timely topics. The author also makes it clear that there's no room for pity, neither for his own choices nor those of his mother, who struggled with addiction, or the collection of black men he homages as the "composite Pops" who raised him. These are powerful stories of survival in the face of tremendous odds, rendered in a consistently intriguing hybrid of the street-cool hip-hop mathematics of Mos Def and the bluesy, ancestry-minded prison-cell work of Etheridge Knight (especially "The Idea of Ancestry"). The narrative hits its peak when Jackson motions beyond the tenuous spectacle of a moment to understand what came before it and to hope about what deliverance might come after it even while admitting, sometimes ashamedly so, that he is still wrestling with it all.A potent book that revels in the author's truthful experiences while maintaining the jagged-grain, keeping-it-a-100, natural storytelling that made The Residue Years a modern must-read.

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Award-winning novelist Jackson (writing, New York Univ.; The Residue Years) reclaims his history through an elegant memoir that gives authority over his own life, focusing on the 1980s-90s. Jackson's reflection on his youth in Portland, OR, along with his incarceration for and subsequent life in New York is one of rigorous self-examination. In approaching his personal story and family history with honesty and poetry, Jackson frames his experience in terms of his relationships, even going as far as giving narrative space to ex-girlfriends to recount their time with him. The result is an intimate portrayal of what makes us human. VERDICT Jackson's eloquent account is as much about a writer struggling to understand life's jubilations, mistakes, and losses, as it is a chronicle of a black man's place in America, appealing to fans of Kiese Laymon and Ta-Nehisi Coates.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston