Ten Years in the Tub by Nick Hornby

like, an office job, and I’d miss out on three years pissing around at university, and my brilliant career as a… as a something or other would be over before it had even begun. We’d used birth control, of course, because failing to do so would cost us everything, including a very great deal of money, but we were still terrified: I would just as soon have gone to prison as started a family. What Random Family explains, movingly and convincingly and at necessary length, is that the future as Coco and Jessica and the fathers of their children see it really isn’t worth the price of a condom, and they’re right. I eventually became a father for the first time around the same age that Jessica became a grandmother.
    As I hadn’t noticed the publication of Random Family , I caught up with the reviews online. They were for the most part terrific, although one or two people wondered aloud whether LeBlanc’s presence might not have affected behavior and outcome. (Yeah, right. I can see how that might work for an afternoon, but a whole decade? Stick a writer in a corner of the room and watch the combined forces of international economics, the criminal justice system, and the drug trade wither before her pitiless gaze.) “I believe I had far less effect than anybody would imagine,” LeBlanc said in an interview, with what I like to imagine as wry understatement. I did come across this, however, the extraordinary conclusion to a review in the Guardian (UK):
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  It is only by accident, in the acknowledgements, that the book finally confronts the reader with the “American experience of class injustice” that is ostensibly its subject. So many institutions, so many funds and fellowships, retreat centers and universities, publishers, mentors, editors, friends, formed a net to support this one writer. Nothing comparable exists to hold up the countless Cocos and Jessicas…
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  But the tougher question is why the stories of poor people—and not just any poor people but those acquainted with chaos and crime, those the overclass likes to call the underclass—are such valuable raw material, creating a frisson among the literary set and the buyers of books? Why are their lives and private griefs currency for just about anyone but themselves?
    First of all: “by accident”? “BY ACCIDENT”? Those two words, so coolly patronizing and yet, paradoxically, so dim, must have made LeBlanc want to buy a gun. And I think a decent lawyer could have got her off, in the unfortunate event of a shooting. She spends ten years writing a book, and a reviewer in a national newspaper doesn’t even notice what it’s about. (It’s about the American experience of class injustice, among other things.) Secondly: presumably the extension of the argument about grants and fellowships and editors is that they are only appropriate for biographies of bloody, I don’t know, Vanessa Bell; I doubt whether “the support net” has ever been put to better social use.
    And lastly: if you get to the end of Random Family and conclude that it was written to create “a frisson,” then, I’m sorry, but you should be compelled to have your literacy surgically removed, without anesthetic. The lives of Coco and Jessica are “valuable raw material” because people who read books—quite often people who are very quick to judge, quite often people who make or influence social policy—don’t know anyone like them, and certainly have no idea how or sometimes even why they live; until we all begin to comprehend, then nothing can even begin to change. Oh, and there’s no evidence to suggest that Coco and Jessica resented being used in this way; there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they got it. But what would they know, right?
    It’s not