Ten Years in the Tub. Nick Hornby
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BOOKS BOUGHT:
BOOKS READ:
The Polysyllabic Spree—the ninety-nine young and menacingly serene people who run the Believer—recently took their regular columnists out for what they promised would be a riotous and orgiastic night on the town. Now, I have to confess that I’ve never actually seen a copy of this magazine, due to an ongoing dispute with the Spree (I think that as a contributor I should be entitled to a free copy, but they are insisting that I take out a ten-year subscription—does that sound right to you?), so I was completely unaware that there is only one other regular columnist, the Croatian sex lady, and she didn’t show. I suspect that she’d been given a tip-off, probably because she’s a woman (the Spree hold men responsible for the death of Virginia Woolf) and stayed at home. It shouldn’t have made much difference, though, because you can have fun with a hundred people, right?
Wrong. The Spree’s idea of a good time was to book tickets for a literary event—a reading given by all the nominees for the National Book Critics’ Circle Awards—and sit there for two and a half hours. Actually, that’s not quite true: they didn’t sit there. Such is their unquenchable passion for the written word that they were too excited to sit. They stood, and they wept, and they hugged each other, and occasionally they even danced—to the poetry recitals, and some of the more up-tempo biography nominees. In England we don’t often dance at dances, let alone readings, so I didn’t know where to look. Needless to say, drink, drugs, food, and sex played no part in the festivities. But who needs any of that when you’ve got literature?
I did, however, discover a couple of books as a result of the evening: Tony Hoagland’s What Narcissism Means to Me, which didn’t win the poetry award, and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family, which didn’t win the nonfiction award. I haven’t read the books that did win, and therefore cannot comment on the judges’ inexplicable decisions, but they must be pretty good, because Hoagland’s poems and LeBlanc’s study of life in the Bronx were exceptional.
Middle-class people—especially young middle-class people—spend an awful lot of time and energy attempting to familiarize themselves with what’s going down on the street. Random Family is a one-stop shop: it tells you everything you need to know, and may even stop you from hankering after a gun or a crack habit as a quick way out of the graduate-school ghetto. And yes, I know that all reality is mediated, and so on and so forth, but this book does a pretty good job of convincing you that it knows whereof it speaks.
Random Family is about two women, Coco and Jessica; LeBlanc’s story, which took her ten years to write and research, begins when they’re in their mid-teens, and follows them through the next couple of decades. Despite the simplicity of the setup, it’s not always an easy narrative to follow. If LeBlanc were a novelist, you’d have to observe that she’s screwed up by overpopulating her book, but Coco and Jessica and the Bronx don’t give her an awful lot of choice, because Random Family is partly about overpopulation. Coco and Jessica have so many babies, by so many fathers, and their children have so many half-siblings, that at times it’s impossible to keep the names straight. By the time the two women are in their early thirties, they have given birth to Mercedes, Nikki, Nautica, Pearl, LaMonte, Serena, Brittany, Stephany, Michael, and Matthew, by Cesar, Torres, Puma (or maybe Victor), Willy (or maybe Puma), Kodak, Wishman, and Frankie. This is a book awash with sperm (Jessica even manages to conceive twins while in prison, after an affair with a guard), and at one stage I was wondering whether it was medically possible for a man to become pregnant through reading it. I think I’m probably too old.
The combination of LeBlanc’s scrupulous attention to quotidian detail and her absolute refusal to judge is weirdly reminiscent of Peter Guralnick’s approach to Elvis in his monumental two-volume biography. Those of you who read the Elvis books will know that though Presley’s baffling, infuriating last decade gave Guralnick plenty of opportunity to leap in and tell you what he thinks, he never once does so. LeBlanc’s stern neutrality is generous and important: she hectors nobody, and the space she leaves us allows us to think properly, to recognize for ourselves all the millions of complications that shape these lives.
There are many, many things, a zillion things, that make my experiences different from those of Coco and Jessica. But it was remembering my first pregnancy scare that helped me to fully understand the stupidity and purposelessness of the usual conservative rants about responsibility and fecklessness and blah blah blah. It was the summer before I went to college, and my girlfriend’s period was late, and I spent two utterly miserable weeks convinced that my life was over. I’d have to get, 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):
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…
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