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.

  

     

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025) by Stephen Graham Jones

 Audiobook Review

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025)

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Stephen Graham Jones is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet nation in Montana.  He is also a prolific author of genre fiction, with a bibliography that dates back to 2000, and usually with one publication a year, or two publications in one year and none in the next.  I'd never heard of him until he published The Only Good Indians, which was picked up by Simon & Schuster and represented a step up in authorial profile and out of the limitations of genre fiction (his previous publisher was Tor- a science fiction/fantasy/horror genre specialist.)

  I actually didn't like The Only Good Indian and didn't finish the Audiobook I checked out from the library, but that could have had something to do with the pandemic era publication date.  I also didn't know about the author's tribal affiliation, which makes a big difference in distinguishing genre horror from speculative but literary fiction.  The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, to me, is like, a riff on Interview with a Vampire but with the intent to actually say something about its historical era, instead of using the historical elements as scenery for the soap-opera plot.  It is also very much a horror novel with a very...um. visceral and uniquely Mountain West take on the familiar tropes of vampire lit.

  The format. a mysterious, black-clad Native American with an acute sensitivity to sunlight shows up one day in a late 19th century Montana frontier church whose minister has his own connections to the events that have touched the life of the stranger.  He insists on unburdening himself to the preacher over a series of evenings, and then the preacher recounts the events to his journal.

  Jones uses a somewhat awkward but historically accurate/appropriate framing device for this sort of 19th century yard, a present-day graduate student in western history who is the last descendant of the frontier preacher and who comes into possession of his narrative.  Considering his lengthy publication history, it's hard not to suspect that Jones is writing with editorial guidance about maximizing the potential for what I would imagine would be an FX miniseries adaptation.   More power to him- I think it would be a great tv show/movie, but you'd have to get the violence right, which would be tough. 

  The Audiobook is also good for this book because you get the Native American narrator voice, which I wouldn't have wanted to do in my head, reading a paper/e copy at home.

Plum Bun (1925) by Jesi Redmon Fauset

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral (1925)

by Jesi Redmon Fauset

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania: 6/27

   I've dramatically slowed down on the pace of 1,001 Novels: A Library of American because of less job-related driving (Audiobooks) and more job-related work (reading and writing and generally running around more).   Still, I was excited to listen to Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral which is a forgotten classic from a key (but largely forgotten) member of the Harlem Renaissance, Jesi Redmon Fauset.  Plum Bun is a novel about the experience of "passing" where (in this context) an African-American, usually a woman, abandons her racial identity in favor of living among white people.   It's a phenomenon that is best demonstrated in Nella Larsen's 1929 novel, Passing and the introduction makes a point of asking why the canon only includes one such tale.  From my perspective, it's understandable.  Larsen's book is centered around a woman who marries a white man who believes her to be white, and the resulting action is memorable and tragic.  

  In Plum Bun, on the on the hand, protagonist Angela Murray carefully avoids such a situation and generally speaking lives more like an existentialist hero- avoiding close attachments while yearning for them at the same time- than a heroine in a novel published in the 1920's in the US.  Plum Bun is also a book that seems somewhat randomly assigned to Philadelphia because Angela Murray grew up there.  Almost the entire book is set in New York City, and New York City is really the only place that the Author puts across to the reader- I didn't get much of a sense of Philadelphia at all beyond her childhood memories of "passing" with her mother, who was also light-skinned. 

Porgy (1925) by Dubose Heyward

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Porgy (1925)

by Dubose Heyward

Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina: 15/16

    Here is another novel written about African-Americans by a white dude- using the "Gullah" dialect. (which to contemporary ears sounds like the way racists think black people talk in the South but which is actually a distinct dialect with deep African roots). Heyward turned this book into Porgy and Bess, an opera which had worldwide success but I'm assuming was racist as shit which is why no one talks about it anymore.  It was hard to get over the racist tropes in Porgy and I would def ask editor Susan Straight about this pick for sure.

Dry Bones in the Valley (2014) by Tim Bouman

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Dry Bones in the Valley (2014)

by Tim Bouman

Susquehanna Municipality, Franklin Forks, Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania: 5/27

  Dry Bones in the Valley is another regional police procedural set in the Pennstucky, i.e. the Pennsylvania Appalachians.   Unlike the Amish-country set snoozer from yesterday,  Dry Bones in the Valley is more interesting, if only because of the frequent and animated presence of guns, gun fire and gun play on nearly every page.  It turns out the people in this part of the country really like their guns.  All kind of guns- pistols, rifles and even muzzle loaded muskets, which play an important part in unravelling one of the two murders that must be solved.

   Bouman does an excellent job of evoking this unfamiliar (to me, anyway) part of the country, with plenty of well described walks in different landscapes. There isn't a great deal of tension that the murder victim remains a john doe up until the case is actually solved, which guts many of the emotions a reader might invest in a book of this genre.  There is very little building of the case and then the solving at the end reads like something out of an Encyclopedia Brown book, but still, I did enjoy this relative to other examples of detective fiction in the 1,001 Novels project.

Just Plain Murder (2018) by Laura Bradford

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Just Plain Murder (2018)

by Laura Bradford

Paradise, Pennsylvania 

Pennsylvania: 4/27

   Editor Susan Straight loves herself a regional detective novel, so I wasn't surprised that "Amish Country" is represented in the 1,001 Novels project by, yes, you guessed it, a detective novel set in Amish country.  Straight calls this "an engrossing debut" in her map copy but this was honestly one of my least favorite books in the entire 1,001 Novels project.  The narrator is not the detective himself but rather his girlfriend, a thirty-something who has retreated to Amish country to run a small tchotchke store after her marriage in New York City broke up.   There is less action in Just Plain Murder than your average coming of age book about an underprivileged girl growing up in the urban Northeast- and fewer murders.  When the mystery is finally solved, the reader is likely to be struck by the over-all weakness of the entire book. And so much talk about this sad ladies feelings. 

Old School (2003) by Tobias Wolff

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Old School (2003)

by Tobias Wolff

Pottstown, Pennsylvania 

Pennsylvania: 3/27

   The way the Pennsylvania picks for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America are arranged geographically, there is a heavy concentration inside the triangle of Philadelphia, Lancaster and Allentown, weighted towards Philly.  There's are no picks from the entire Northwest quadrant of the state, and then a smattering of titles between Philly and Pittsburgh.   Old School, set at a prep school, is located smack in the center of the eastern triangle of titles and it is also notable because Tobias Wolff, is, astonishingly, the first author to be selected twice in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of American project.  Wolff, of course, is already in the 1,001 Novels project representing New Jersey with another school (university) set title, The Final Club.

   I actually enjoyed Old School- I picked it out because it was available as an Audiobook selection- because it involves real life authors visiting this fictious school and thus engages with popular-American literary culture circa the late 1950's early 1960's, as witnessed by a student at the school- the narrator.  The Final Club (1990) and this book were written a decade apart.  If you look at his Amazon Author page, this book is his third top title and The Final Club is out of print, so.  

   I really liked reading/hearing about Ayn Rand and Hemingway as characters, and the thoughts that these characters had about them, although there is nothing ground-breaking as far as actual insight goes, it makes the prep-school centered plot less insufferable than it would have otherwise been (see my review of The Final Club.) 

God's Pocket (1983) by Pete Dexter

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

God's Pocket (1983)

by Pete Dexter

Devil's Pocket, South Philadelphia Pennsylvania 

Pennsylvania: 2/27

       Still finishing up the last chapter in print, but I'm on to the next chapter in Audiobook, and I actually enjoyed God's Pocket, which is about a South Philadelphia construction murder who is murdered on the job (deservedly so, many would say) and the consequences in its aftermath.  Pete Dexter is a newspaper columnist turned novelist, most known for winning the National Book Award in 1988 for his novel Paris Trout.  His last novel was published in 2009, and I'm guessing he is retired given his lack of recent publishing activity.   The most interesting aspect of this book for me is the character of the urban newspaper columnist- a role which had quite a run in the 20th century as an arbiter of urban intellectualism in many US cities but which has (sadly?) fallen by the wayside. 

      I thought God's Pocket would be a good Audiobook because of the working-class, Philadelphia accents, and I was not wrong.  At a little over six hours, it made for quick listen and it gave me the thought to go look up the 2014 movie, which starred Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Let the Dead Bury the Dead (1992) by Randall Kenan

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Let the Dead Bury the Dead (1992)

by Randall Kenan

Tim's Creek, North Carolina

North Carolina: 16/20

   Let the Dead Bury the Dead is a book of (inter-connected?) short stories set in the fictional town of Tim's Creek, founded by an escaped slave on the model of the "Maroon" communities of Jamaica.  The final story in the collection gives some historical context, and this isn't the first book of short-stories in the 1,001 Novels project to be set in a similar environment.  Despite having stories with fantastical elements- the first story features an infant who can tell the future-  Let the Dead Bury the Dead has a realist vibe even when the subject matter is more like speculative fiction.  

  Probably the most unusual aspect of Let the Dead Bury the Dead is the LGBT themed story- rare for the rural south and even rarer for rural African-American communities, though editor Susan Straight has gone out of her way to include those viewpoints in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  Kenan was known as a member of the LGBT community before his death in 2020. 

A Crooked Tree (2021) by Una Mannion

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

 A Crooked Tree (2021)

by Una Mannion

Valley Forge Mountain, Pennsylvania 

Pennsylvania: 1/27

   New Year, New States!  I've run out of easily available Audiobooks from the last chapter (Maryland through South Carolina) so I'm moving forward on two fronts- back north to Pennsylvania and continuing south through Georgia and Florida while I try to polish off the Ebook/physical book portion of the prior chapter.   The first book from Pennsylvania is A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion.  This novel is from the most common category of the 1,001 Novels project:  A bildungsroman written from the POV of a adolescent girl in difficult socio-economic circumstances, sub-category white, sub-category debut novel.  Like almost all of the books in this category we've got a narrator who is trapped in her family home, in the middle of nowhere (played here by someplace called "Valley Forge Mountain.")

  Here, our narrator is Libby, an awkward 15 year old girl living with her single mom and three siblings (one older sister, one older brother, two younger sisters.)  Driving home from school at the beginning of the book, her younger sister angers her Mom to the point where mom abandons younger sister on the side of the road, forcing her to walk home.  Sister is picked up and mildly assaulted by the sinister "barbie man" an albino type dude with long blonde hair.  Sister jumps out of barbie man's moving vehicle to escape and reaches Libby's weekly babysitting gig, promising her to secrecy so that their mom doesn't get in trouble.  Events move forward from that point in somewhat predictable fashion- I was surprised at the number of reviewers who expressed enthusiasm at the plotting in A Crooked Tree but it might be a function of my day-to-day experience in the criminal justice system.

     The world of "the mountain" is well-depicted, but I wasn't particularly enthralled by Libby or her troubled family.