The New New Journalism by Robert Boynton

Author:Robert Boynton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non fiction
ISBN: 9780307429049
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

ADRIAN NICOLE LEBLANC

There were nights during the decade that Adrian Nicole LeBlanc reported Random Family—her 2002 saga of drugs, crime, life, and love in the South Bronx—that she’d grow so fatigued she would simply hand her tape recorder to her interview subject and go home to sleep. “Do whatever you want with it,” she’d say. Part desperate measure, part journalistic ploy, the practice provided her with valuable material.

Coco, the book’s protagonist, would read her lover’s prison letters into the recorder after her children had gone to sleep; others shared secrets they were too shy to discuss with LeBlanc in person; some just goofed around, singing songs and telling jokes that would make LeBlanc smile when she listened to the tape later. “Maybe I secretly wish my characters could tell their own stories. They’d probably do a better job than I do,” she says.

Most likely they wouldn’t, of course. But in LeBlanc’s fantasy one finds the kernel of truth, the feeling of unmediated access she provides the reader. The New York Times’s Janet Maslin called Random Family “a book that exerts the fascination of a classic unflinching documentary.” Combined with what the writer Mark Kramer has called LeBlanc’s “relentless neutrality,” her up close view of life in the drug-ridden South Bronx can be unnerving, no matter your political outlook.

LeBlanc’s technique has led a number of critics to conclude that she is condoning, rather than simply depicting, her characters’ behavior. Conservatives criticized her for not being more of a social critic or policy analyst, for failing to chastise her subjects’ tendency to have children out of wedlock, subsist on welfare, or dabble in crime. Liberals faulted her for portraying the poor in such a direct, unsentimental light.

A few commentators recoiled at LeBlanc’s frankness, assuming that her troubled characters were chosen with sensationalism, rather than realism, as her goal. Writing in The Washington Post, John L. Jackson Jr. called the book “a Jerry Springer-ish account of unwed mothers and the drug dealers who love them.” Others, like The Village Voice’s Amy Farley, sensed the novelistic complexity of LeBlanc’s vision, calling Random Family “perhaps the most intimate chronicle of urban life ever published.” In the Los Angeles Times, Lauren Sandler concurred, calling it “a nonfiction Middlemarch of the underclass.”

Most readers appreciated how hard LeBlanc had worked to suspend the norms of middle-class judgments that most writers make of the poor, and to simply bear witness to her subjects’ lives. As the writer/editor Anne Fadiman told New York magazine, “I know of no other writer who dug in as deep. She didn’t just report; she burrowed into a world so well that she lost every speck of foreignness.” Writing in Newsday, Liza Featherstone noted the delicate balance LeBlanc struggled to maintain between comprehension and forgiveness: “She doesn’t fail to observe her subjects’ mistakes, yet she shows us how little room they have for error.”

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc was born in 1963 and grew up in Leominster, Massachusetts, a small factory town near Boston. Her father was a union organizer; her mother worked in a drug rehab center.

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