Random Family
LeBlanc spent eleven years embedded in the lives of two women and their families in the South Bronx drug economy, producing a work of immersive journalism that reads like a novel but is more damning than any polemic about poverty, mass incarceration, and the crack epidemic's aftermath. A landmark of American journalism.
The same refusal to editorialise reads to detractors as an absence of analysis, with “no subtext about the plight of the poor.” The voice is called cold to the point of numbing, “one giant insensate run-on list,” one reader saying it “reads like a synopsis for a book rather than a book.” A granular tic gets noticed: “people ‘broke night' three times a page.” The cast overwhelms, and even the trade press concedes “the storyline occasionally becomes confusing.” Readers from the community object that one extreme drug-dealing family stands in for the Bronx. And there is no epilogue.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
