Random Family: love, drugs, trouble and coming of age in the Bronx
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc Flamingo, 408pp, £17.99
ISBN 0007163444
Book reviewing has a tendency to unleash the inner schoolteacher. Out comes the red pen, and before long the book in hand - like homework - can be judged by the proliferation of underlinings. I have read Random Family twice and to me it seems unblemished.
Through the life stories of two young women, the book tells the true tale of a tenuously extended Puerto Rican family in the Bronx. We meet Jessica and Coco in their teens, impressionable and impatient girls growing up in households defined by poverty and dominated by drugs, sexual abuse, abandonment and violence. Both pregnant by the time they are 16, the girls are condemned to a predictable path of passionate but abusive love affairs, drug dealing, prison, welfare, babies, babies and more babies. By the end of the book, they have nine children between them, Jessica is about to become a grandmother, and they are scarcely into their thirties.
The journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc spent ten years with them, sharing the crises and high dramas - court cases, births, release dates - but more often the inconsequential days spent in overcrowded apartments or on the volatile streets. "Outside, Jessica believed, anything could happen." But although LeBlanc is present, she is utterly invisible; this is a fine piece of observational journalism, presented without opinion or angle. She writes with a novelist's acute empathy for her characters, allowing them to reveal their inner and outer lives.
And so the complex logic of inner-city values - often baffling and exasperating to observers - emerges. Multiple pregnancies with different fathers make sense to teenage girls because babies glue things together, galvanise attention, offer hope. Drug dealing is a rational economic choice, stripped of moral dilemmas by its routine normality and by the absence of alternatives. Violence is a fact of life and the concept of fiscal management an impossible dream. Coco's finances are a calamity of debt and despair, punctuated by impulsive splurges of unaffordable generosity. Her sister Iris is almost alone in trying to budget, and although Coco admires her sister's prudence, it is never a convincing solution. LeBlanc writes:
The rigidity of Iris's approach generated its own problems . . . The family anxiety projected an unspoken, unappealing truth: that living right - which is what Coco called it - was just another precarious hold. Poverty pulled everyone down. Coco loosened her body to minimise the impact of the fall; Iris and Armando froze, and the chill stiffened their kids as well. Even indoors, when Armando planted himself in his favorite chair he gripped the arms.
Random Family has the plot of an action-packed blockbuster, vivid with passion and high crime; LeBlanc has succeeded in capturing a world ordinarily closed to literary observation. Anyone employed to intervene in the lives of its subjects - politicians, doctors, teachers - will learn more from this book than from any policy document. Although it concerns one neighbourhood in the Bronx during the 1980s and 1990s, its truths are universal. I had always thought the phrase that critics occasionally use - "If you buy just one book this year, make it this one" - quite meaningless until I read Random Family.
Decca Aitkenhead is the author of The Promised Land: travels in search of the perfect E (Fourth Estate)
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