Random Family (2003) by Adrian LeBlanc

 100 Best Books of the 21st Century (New York Times)

Random Family (2003)

by Adrian LeBlanc

#25

       This might be THE most representative book from the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list, a 432 page in depth exploration of the life and times of a loosely related group of New Yorkers who are knee deep in the crack epidemic.  You've got Coco Rodriguez, the main character, a woman who manages to have four children by three different men in between the ages of 17 and 24.  You've got Jessica Martinez, the consort of a notorious crack kingpin who is sentenced to life in Federal Prison during the book, and who herself serves a ten year federal prison sentence over the course of Random Family.  You've got Coco and Jessica's respective families, who are equally filled with child sexual abuse, drug usage, child neglect and early/frequent exposure to domestic violence.

   As someone who deals with individuals who are enmeshed with the Federal Criminal Justice system because of their participation in drug trafficking, I am well familiar with the social milieus that produce the characters in this book, and everything that they say or do was familiar to me- listening to the Audiobook of Random Family was like listening to a 20 hour federal probation report, where probation officers try to get to the heart of the same questions that LeBlanc frames in 15 pages instead of 400.

   A common theme, both in Random Family and my own professional experience, is disordered living.  A one parent household headed by Mom, or a serial household with Mom and a succession of partner's, is common.  It's been my own observation, borne out at length in Random Family, is that people who get into organized criminal activity do it because a) they never think it will end up with them serving decade long prison sentences b) they literally do not have a single other idea about what do besides crime. The men in this book, most of whom spend the entirety of the book in Federal or State Prison make these decisions when they are very young and even as they spend their ten, twenty year or life in prison sentences, the level of self-reflection is minimal because there were never any other choices to be made.

  The women on the other hand, again, based both on the experiences depicted in Random Family and my own professional experiences, is that women often believe that the only thing they have to offer is their body and that a child is their best chance of forging a lasting relationship with a providing male. When this inevitably fails to happen, the man disappears, and the woman is left with the child.  Coco, at the center of this book, is incapable of making a reasoned decision or really even looking after her own interesting, rather she is buffeted by the day-to-day chaos of the consequences of her decision to have four children with three different men.

  Coco is, in a sense, amazing in that she manages to keep her tattered family together through the entire book.  Jessica, on the other hand, manages to get impregnated by a guard while in prison and foists the children off on her long-suffering mother, also caring for some of her other children which she left behind to serve her decade long prison sentence.   The men are equally despicable and pathetic, the tattered flotsam of late-stage capitalism, going nowhere and doing nothing.  What, one wonders, is the end game for anyone in Random Family, except as a burden to the state and incubator of intergenerational trauma.   Those looking for answers will find none here and the author doesn't bother to try- it's not that type of book.