Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

Riveting portrait of a family in the Bronx ghetto where they live. The author became part of this family for 10 years, and her immersion gives this book a verisimilitude that is often lacking in less well-researched books I've read. It was a difficult read but a fascinating one. ( )

I read this right after The Warmth of Other Suns, and so I found the voice to be less personal and warm and out-front than in that book. ( )

A true story of poverty, addiction, babies having babies, and the vicious cycle that all of this perpetuated for a couple of families in the Bronx during the ‘80s. Although the book focused on two families, this was basically an ethnographic study that could have been dissected from any project in North America, at any time in the last five or six decades.

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. ( )

Interesting book, highly readable in an almost gossipy way, about a (very) extended family in the Bronx, and their neighbors and other entourage. Poor people all, not very well educated, and mostly reliant on each other and on welfare to survive. The author followed these people for eleven years, and wrote a book describing in quite extraordinary detail how their lives develop during those years.

Almost everyone has a rough idea of what it must be like to grow up in a ghetto environment with drugs and crime all around you, and how hard it is to get away from it. But you might think that if someone growing up there made an effort, they might be able to escape or attain a better life for themselves and their children. The author of this book did a good job of showing how hard that really is in practice. How even people who don't want to get in trouble and do everything they can to stay on the right path might get in trouble despite their efforts. Why people who decide they want to have no more kids, because they have too many already and cannot support them and care for them, end up having more kids anyway. Why it is that mothers can't keep their daughters from getting pregnant at 16, why they can't keep them in school, and why they rarely manage to hold down a job for more than a few weeks at a time. ( )