'The Tigers of Lents'

Published just this week: “The Tigers of Lents,” by Portland novelist Mark Pomeroy.

The “tigers” in the title are the fierce members of the Garrison family, tangled up in a snarl of poverty and misfortune. Lents is where they live, a gritty neighborhood on Portland’s outskirts.

For the last six years, Keith Garrison has been in prison, serving time for burglary. His wife, Melanie, is exhausted from trying to hold things together on her income as a Fred Meyer cashier, and when she gets home every night she checks out of life’s disappointments by drinking unlimited quantities of cheap wine.

Living in poverty is hard enough, but it’s even harder living in a single-parent household when that parent is an alcoholic.

This week’s book

“The Tigers of Lents” by Mark Pomeroy

University of Iowa Press — 234 pp — $19.95

Keith and Melanie’s three teenage daughters, Sara, Elaine and Rachel, each harbor varying degrees of resentment and self-loathing.

The girls also have a half-brother, 5-year-old Adam, who’s never known his dad. Melanie hadn’t bothered to get the name of the man she had the one-night stand with shortly after her husband went away to prison.

For as long as any of the kids can remember, their home has been filled with animosity and bickering.

By now, Sara and Rachel sometimes escape for days at a time. Sara hangs out with her best friend, Kim. Bookworm Rachel skips school and “the soul-numbing idiocy dished out by automatons” and spends nights with her boyfriend Kurt in his basement bedroom at his mom’s house.

Reliable Elaine stays behind to take care of Adam, but finds her escape in food, gorging on the cheap carbs that are the family’s typical fare.

But things are beginning to change. For starters, the neighborhood high school is being shut down. Sara will have graduated by then, but Elaine and Rachel will be bused to a school in a different part of town where they’ll really stand out as kids from the other side of the tracks.

Keith is released from prison and wants to reconnect with his girls, but Melanie isn’t going to make that easy for him.

Rachel’s uneasy relationship with Kurt becomes messier when she discovers she is pregnant.

Tough as nails Sara is offered a full-ride soccer scholarship to the University of Portland but is secretly uncertain she can navigate a world so different from the one she has known. And shy Elaine, the homebody, pines to insert herself “out in the world, part of things”

“The Tigers of Lents” is spare with dialogue but rich with interior monologue — the reader is heartbreakingly privy to so many missed opportunities for connection between the characters.

But each of those characters has the grit to persevere. Sometimes someone does throw a lifeline in their direction, but more often, it’s a slender filament of inspiration — just when it happens to be needed most.

Author Pomeroy has a keen eye for detail and a capacious understanding of integrity. Choices, setbacks, small but significant triumphs — all are woven into this powerful story about the modern-day working class.