The Set Up
The revealing memoir The Set Up is about overcoming adversity through religion, connections, and personal strength.
Carl Edward Jackson’s candid memoir The Set Up is about his tumultuous adulthood in the South.
When Jackson was thirty-three, his close friend was arrested, he was sexually assaulted, and he lost his job, fraying his psyche until he was left with only his relationship to God. In moving vignettes, Jackson documents such tragedies with candor and humor, though breezing past his traumatic childhood and twenties to do so. Indeed, instead of preferencing linearity, the book focuses on the lowest moments of Jackson’s life, including a period incarceration that is portrayed as almost inevitable, working to strain lessons from such moments. It also engages in occasional proselytization and places considerable focus is on treating hard moments as the consequences of Jackson’s own actions to support the message that he overcame adversity through religion, connection, and personal strength.
Despite skipping over periods in Jackson’s life, the memoir keeps its momentum because of the candidness of the prose. Indeed, though its general themes are somber, the language is imbued with a sense of hope found in faith. It also covers personal mental health struggles, including an incident when Jackson spit on a police officer during a psychotic break in an open manner. Nonetheless, the story resists cohesion beyond its central themes. Its time period is kept vague, and some questions, as of what happened to Jackson’s father after he left home, are unanswered.
Snappy conversations ground the story somewhat, including through their use of slang. Jackson uses these to flesh out life in Atlanta’s Black queer community, which is further given shape by the use of wry humor. But outside of the book’s conversations, the book tends to be quite straightforward, evocative because of its content rather than its style. Direct addresses to God punctuate it, as do cultural explanations: at a club, Jackson does “a thug boy dance. You know, barely move, and bop your head a little bit.”
Some sensory details are included, as with a mention of a blinking white diamond on a billboard that led Jackson to apply to a job that he later regretted, but such tactile details are ultimately too few and far between. In working to cover decades in a limited space, the book’s general tendency is to eschew descriptive language in favor of straightforward explanations of events. In the same manner, it works toward an abrupt ending marked by personal reflections and lessons learned.
An intimate memoir, The Set Up is about abuse, mental illness, and systemic racism in the broken US justice system.
Reviewed by
Leah Block
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
