No way out
Saturday 13 December 2003
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
408pp, Flamingo, £17.
Someone once said, apropos nonfiction, that every writer betrays her subject. Intentions have nothing to do with it. Even fuelled by the best of them, "the story" is no longer the subject's but a processed thing, the real-life character's mixed-up narrative of history, memory, self-deception or protection made a coherent commodity, tradeable, by the writer, for cash, prestige, prizes. Any professional who has ever written about poor people especially has had to face this. I imagine Adrian Nicole LeBlanc must have done so more than once over the 11 years she spent assiduously recording the big events, daily goings-on, small-time joys and agonies of the "random family" of which, by her own account, she became a part in the course of her research. Then she wrote herself out of the story, becoming in the process its most provocative character: the voyeur who is everywhere and nowhere, watching and telling as things fall apart.
