like, an office job, and Iâd 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. Weâd 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 isnât worth the price of a condom, and theyâre right. I eventually became a father for the first time around the same age that Jessica became a grandmother.
As I hadnât 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 LeBlancâs 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.) âI believe I had far less effect than anybody would imagine,â 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):
            It is only by accident, in the acknowledgements, that the book finally confronts the reader with the âAmerican experience of class injusticeâ 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 Jessicasâ¦
                  But the tougher question is why the stories of poor peopleâand not just any poor people but those acquainted with chaos and crime, those the overclass likes to call the underclassâare 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: âby accidentâ? âBY ACCIDENTâ? 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 doesnât even notice what itâs about. (Itâs 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 donât know, Vanessa Bell; I doubt whether âthe support netâ 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 âa frisson,â then, Iâm sorry, but you should be compelled to have your literacy surgically removed, without anesthetic. The lives of Coco and Jessica are âvaluable raw materialâ because people who read booksâquite often people who are very quick to judge, quite often people who make or influence social policyâdonât 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 thereâs 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?
Itâs not
As I hadnât 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 LeBlancâs 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.) âI believe I had far less effect than anybody would imagine,â 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):
            It is only by accident, in the acknowledgements, that the book finally confronts the reader with the âAmerican experience of class injusticeâ 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 Jessicasâ¦
                  But the tougher question is why the stories of poor peopleâand not just any poor people but those acquainted with chaos and crime, those the overclass likes to call the underclassâare 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: âby accidentâ? âBY ACCIDENTâ? 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 doesnât even notice what itâs about. (Itâs 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 donât know, Vanessa Bell; I doubt whether âthe support netâ 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 âa frisson,â then, Iâm sorry, but you should be compelled to have your literacy surgically removed, without anesthetic. The lives of Coco and Jessica are âvaluable raw materialâ because people who read booksâquite often people who are very quick to judge, quite often people who make or influence social policyâdonât 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 thereâs 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?
Itâs not
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