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#5 Platform - Random Family
Apr. 13th, 2011 12:39 pmHere's a side of New York I don't think about much.
Title: Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx
Author: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Provenance: Borrowed from Westmount Library
How do you approach reading a book that you expect to be really depressing? Let me give you an example: this book, Random Family, was pitched to me as a non-fiction tale following two women over the course of a generation, from when they're teenagers through when their kids are teenagers, living in the Bronx and then in upstate New York, in poverty, and shows their attempts and ultimate failures to break out of the situation they find themselves in.
I know, this sounds like the sort of book you want to just run out and read, right? And it really is. It's not that the description there is wrong. It's that it's too reductive. This book was engrossing, interesting, thought-provoking, and humanizing - even despite the overlay of desperation and depression that is certainly a part of it.
The story does indeed follow two women, Jessica and Coco, who live in the same neighborhood in the Bronx. The book starts out following Jessica more, and focuses more on Coco as she becomes interested in Jessica's brother, Cesar. Each of them is the product of a broken home, gets involved with criminals, has multiple kids by multiple parents, etc. That side of the story is pretty depressing, sure.
There's a lot of hope to the story, and a lot of attempt to struggle to improve, though. To make things happier for their kids, to provide a better life, to work some way out - these are the goals. Jessica and Coco, and really, everyone around them, make good choices some small amount of the time, and bad choices the rest of it, and unfortunately, it seems like you really need to make the right choice every time and have good luck to get out of the situation, and even if they know approaches - how to go homeless for a while to get better housing, how to move around to maximize your chances, etc. - the luck isn't perfect, and the ties to family are too strong to really escape.
There's a ton more to say about this book, all sorts of points to think from, about a kind of life that I've never had or probably never really could have imagined. LeBlanc's prose is clean and non-judgmental, and she had all the access she needed to tell the story properly. Not judging these people gives the book the impact it has; you can see their hopes and you can see their problems presented in an even-handed light. In the end, you feel worst for the kids, of which there are quite a lot, but then, at the outset of the story, Jessica, Coco, Jessica's brother and Coco's boyfriend Cesar, etc. were mostly kids, too.
Actually, in a sense, I feel worst for one of the secondary characters, Milagros, who was the best friend of Jessica's first baby's father. She decries relationships with men, doesn't want to have kids, and just wants to be independent, and because of the ties in the community she has, ends up with a life that she really couldn't have wanted, even if she makes a lot of the right choices for herself.
What it comes down to, then, is that this story speaks powerfully to the stickiness of poverty and its culture. There are no shortcuts out, and everything can drag you back in. The criminals have the flashy money and the easier life, it seems, but then they get sent to prison and are gone. Abuse is rampant, both physical and sexual, of children and adults, and then the victims have to live with that forever. The system set up to help them seems arbitrary, and has a hard time accommodating single mothers with multiple kids by different fathers, which almost all of these families are. Not having money means skimping on everything, but you need to look right to show poverty isn't grinding you down, so you buy the name brands and the pretty clothes and then flail for everything else. Whenever there is money, you have all sorts of ties to pay back to your family and friends - and there are all sorts of connections - and it seems gone within an instant.
This book really powerfully gets across to me the power of boredom, though. Good choices could be made more easily, but there's no access to a lot of the resources needed to fix that, and where there are, there's still awful, crushing boredom. So getting in fights is better than being bored, or hooking up with someone you shouldn't is better than just being bored, or getting high is better than just doing nothing. So many of the choices seem driven by just not having anything else apparent they can do, and that's what's ultimately the hardest to read.
So: yes, when you approach a book that seems this depressing, it can be hard, but something, there's a lot more there than the first description you hear. A lot more to make you think, and a lot more to life than just the hardships. These are real people, you can feel it, and there are real lessons to be learned. No wonder this got so many accolades. I very highly recommend this one.
Next up: I have some catching up to do (what else is new?), but I'm in Take Time for Paradise now.
Title: Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx
Author: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Provenance: Borrowed from Westmount Library
How do you approach reading a book that you expect to be really depressing? Let me give you an example: this book, Random Family, was pitched to me as a non-fiction tale following two women over the course of a generation, from when they're teenagers through when their kids are teenagers, living in the Bronx and then in upstate New York, in poverty, and shows their attempts and ultimate failures to break out of the situation they find themselves in.
I know, this sounds like the sort of book you want to just run out and read, right? And it really is. It's not that the description there is wrong. It's that it's too reductive. This book was engrossing, interesting, thought-provoking, and humanizing - even despite the overlay of desperation and depression that is certainly a part of it.
The story does indeed follow two women, Jessica and Coco, who live in the same neighborhood in the Bronx. The book starts out following Jessica more, and focuses more on Coco as she becomes interested in Jessica's brother, Cesar. Each of them is the product of a broken home, gets involved with criminals, has multiple kids by multiple parents, etc. That side of the story is pretty depressing, sure.
There's a lot of hope to the story, and a lot of attempt to struggle to improve, though. To make things happier for their kids, to provide a better life, to work some way out - these are the goals. Jessica and Coco, and really, everyone around them, make good choices some small amount of the time, and bad choices the rest of it, and unfortunately, it seems like you really need to make the right choice every time and have good luck to get out of the situation, and even if they know approaches - how to go homeless for a while to get better housing, how to move around to maximize your chances, etc. - the luck isn't perfect, and the ties to family are too strong to really escape.
There's a ton more to say about this book, all sorts of points to think from, about a kind of life that I've never had or probably never really could have imagined. LeBlanc's prose is clean and non-judgmental, and she had all the access she needed to tell the story properly. Not judging these people gives the book the impact it has; you can see their hopes and you can see their problems presented in an even-handed light. In the end, you feel worst for the kids, of which there are quite a lot, but then, at the outset of the story, Jessica, Coco, Jessica's brother and Coco's boyfriend Cesar, etc. were mostly kids, too.
Actually, in a sense, I feel worst for one of the secondary characters, Milagros, who was the best friend of Jessica's first baby's father. She decries relationships with men, doesn't want to have kids, and just wants to be independent, and because of the ties in the community she has, ends up with a life that she really couldn't have wanted, even if she makes a lot of the right choices for herself.
What it comes down to, then, is that this story speaks powerfully to the stickiness of poverty and its culture. There are no shortcuts out, and everything can drag you back in. The criminals have the flashy money and the easier life, it seems, but then they get sent to prison and are gone. Abuse is rampant, both physical and sexual, of children and adults, and then the victims have to live with that forever. The system set up to help them seems arbitrary, and has a hard time accommodating single mothers with multiple kids by different fathers, which almost all of these families are. Not having money means skimping on everything, but you need to look right to show poverty isn't grinding you down, so you buy the name brands and the pretty clothes and then flail for everything else. Whenever there is money, you have all sorts of ties to pay back to your family and friends - and there are all sorts of connections - and it seems gone within an instant.
This book really powerfully gets across to me the power of boredom, though. Good choices could be made more easily, but there's no access to a lot of the resources needed to fix that, and where there are, there's still awful, crushing boredom. So getting in fights is better than being bored, or hooking up with someone you shouldn't is better than just being bored, or getting high is better than just doing nothing. So many of the choices seem driven by just not having anything else apparent they can do, and that's what's ultimately the hardest to read.
So: yes, when you approach a book that seems this depressing, it can be hard, but something, there's a lot more there than the first description you hear. A lot more to make you think, and a lot more to life than just the hardships. These are real people, you can feel it, and there are real lessons to be learned. No wonder this got so many accolades. I very highly recommend this one.
Next up: I have some catching up to do (what else is new?), but I'm in Take Time for Paradise now.
