Drug dealers, teenage mothers with three or four children by different men, sexual abuse, infested apartments ... these are well-rehearsed facts of life in poverty, at once commonplace and incomprehensible. The underclass live elsewhere, the modern West's untouchables, observed and nudged about by policymakers and mostly ignored by the rest of us as a shaming, discomfiting, nuisance.
But what if the most ordinary of the poor were to give us their version of their lives? How different would they be from right-wing representations of feral fecklessness, or left-wing keening over their victimhood?
For the past 11 years, American journalist Adrian Nicole LeBlanc has been visiting and sometimes living with a Puerto Rican-American extended family in New York's South Bronx. She has watched babysitting grandmothers get high on drugs and girls trade sex for a packet of Pampers. She has seen beautiful, sexually magnetic young men shoot and kill each other and playful girls struggle not to be swamped by the daily struggle to feed their children.
The book that emerged is published in Britain tomorrow, having already become a bestseller in the United States. Random Family is painstaking and unsentimental reportage, offered up without hand-wringing or even much evident anger. Dreadful things happen to LeBlanc's subjects, but it is the relentlessness of the detail that eats away at complacency: the mothers dressing up daughters to visit fathers in maximum security prisons; the working women who get their children up at 4am to dress, eat breakfast and fall asleep in front of the television, so that their unemployed boyfriends can just push them out of the door with their book bags when the alarm goes off again.
LeBlanc's minute observations of ordinary life accrete into a contemporary Down and Out in Paris and London, an extraordinary social document which is also a riveting read. The book grew nearly as randomly as the lives of its characters. LeBlanc began with a magazine article about Boy George, a Bronx drugs dealer who, in the late 1980s, was making hundreds of thousands of dollars a day with his own brand of heroin, Obsession. She then became interested in one of George's girlfriends, Jessica (many of the names have been changed, to protect children), who was sexy and sassy, capricious and adorable: like George, she was soon imprisoned. She had briefly been one of his 'mill girls', cutting the drugs; more damagingly, she had passed on messages. Jessica in turn introduced LeBlanc to Coco, her brother Cesar's girlfriend (Cesar would father two of Coco's five children) when she needed a guide to the neighbourhood.
LeBlanc's interest in Coco and affection for her grew and Coco became the core, and heart, of her work over the next nine years. 'People were confused: why would I write about Coco? Jessica, they could understand: she had lived a life that was large in anyone's world. But people would say, "There are so many girls like Coco." I wasn't clear myself. I'd answer that I was writing about what it's like to have your boyfriend locked up, what it's like to be poor, what it's like to have kids when you're young.' LeBlanc's journalistic method is tentative rather than aggressive: both as a researcher and a writer, she prefers to fade into the background.
It is only possible to operate like this if you are a sensitive person, essentially likeable, and I suspect her subjects liked her a lot. (One Christmas, 40 members of the family gathered to present her with an item of underwear so exotic that she didn't know what to do with it. Afterwards, Coco's mother said, 'We thought you needed it'.) But no journalism is value-free; there's also a long-standing debate in anthropology as to whether the presence of a researcher alters what is being observed. LeBlanc noted - with apparent surprise - that this seems to have been a concern of her readers. 'I believe I had far less effect than anybody would imagine. People were dealing with such serious things. And I didn't want it to be the white girl's journey into the ghetto: there have been other books like that. I didn't want to bounce the reporting off that. This is a subject worthy of close scrutiny on its own.'
A related question - how much she should have intervened - is ultimately more troubling. Inevitably, as a white, educated, even rather hard-up Manhattanite, she had resources that they didn't. To what extent did compassion, and their arrangement, oblige her to put them at her subjects' disposal? 'As I came to understand what was happening, I rarely felt I had advice to offer. I could certainly say, "If you give the baby Coca-Cola in a bottle at night, that's connected to the way their teeth are rotting." But I would want to watch that a handful of times before I said anything.
Then I came to understand that name brand soda was expensive, a treat, and if you're saying no to a child all day, and you're putting them to bed, that's a gesture of affection.' LeBlanc resists commentary or interpolation (though once or twice you can discern her anger). Inevitably, though, we are interested in the things that interest her, such as the fact that girls don't seem to have all that much sex, but a lot of babies. 'Sometimes they have sex twice with a guy and end up with a kid. The perception was that if you were prepared for sex, or you asked your partner to take precautions, you were effectively a dirty girl.' So was it dangerous? She thinks for a long time. 'My impulse is to say emotionally dangerous. You don't think, "if I walk up 23 flights I might get raped"; you just think, "I've got to get to the 23rd floor".
But maybe sometimes you can know too much. It just makes you a sadder person. I remember thinking how glad I'd be when Jessica got out of prison, because I knew the sign for a correctional facility, and whenever I drove past this place, I had to think of her being in there. But it didn't really matter, because I knew other women by then, and then it morphed into knowing that a bunch of women like Jessica are always in prison.'
Policymakers have read the book with varying reactions. Some liberal progressives have responded with dismay to LeBlanc's frank reporting of her subjects' joy in their sexuality, their self-destructiveness and determination to have fun: 'It's like, "Why did you have to? It's more information than we need. It's hard enough raising the money and fighting this fight." My feeling is that until poor people can be as mystifying and dopey and loving and befuddled and irrational as the rest of us, the policy isn't going to be grounded strongly enough. If it's about the deserving poor, I just don't go for that, because being poor is being poor.'
Steven Soderbergh has an option on the film rights to Random Family : if the project goes ahead, the people in the book will be paid rights to their stories. The book was a labour of love and LeBlanc probably did not anticipate its success, but now that it has been successful, I wonder whether she considers she owes them anything - not only money? (She reports, almost comically, how even quite large sums of money - a $70,000 personal injury settlement - are shared around family and friends, splurged with a kind of hysterical relief and disappear in a week.)
'I feel my compassion is evidenced by the fact that I wrote this book that holds that feeling of meticulous care and attention. I think the act of paying attention is an act of compassion. I don't know why the people in the book agreed to participate. Perhaps people think their stories are worth telling. Then come any number of reasons why people talk to journalists: boredom, neglect, need, curiosity. I sometimes think for Coco that it was a way of telling the story of this love in her life that it was hard for her to tell him directly. Attention is a very powerful thing.'
She is still in touch with her subjects (and later admits to reading to Coco's children and buying pizzas when they were home with no food and no adults) but her bottom line, I guess, would be that she is a writer, not a social worker. Similarly, she is happy to talk to think-tanks and foundations, but coming up with solutions is not really what she does. (Jessica, who has come, anonymously, to discussions, is surprised by how dreadfully people think she has managed her life. In poor neighbourhoods, where the book is also selling well, people are more inclined to applaud the strength of the mothers.) LeBlanc may write about Coco's family again.
Random Family reads like a novel, but without a novel's finality; it is hard to close the book not knowing what will become of Coco's intelligent, difficult, too-adult daughters. But first she wants to write about the failures of the stand-up comedy circuit; and about policing and American working-class ideas of masculinity. She hopes neither book will take 10 years. She is self-deprecating about why this one did. 'I appreciate the devotion theme of the press, but a lot of it was because I didn't have space or time to write.' Her first publisher dropped her for non-delivery and she could not resell the book. And she got depressed.'I would take handwritten notes, because I couldn't keep up with the transcription, and I'd get back and my boyfriend would say, "sit down and type them into the computer", and I'd think, "what's the point?"'
She is keen to move on. 'The book was over for me after I'd reported it. I feel moved by its life out there, grateful, but also surprised, because I think it leaves people with a fair amount of anxiety. I'm pleased with that, because I think people ought to feel anxious.'
· Random Family, £14.99
