Hobbs methodically reconstructs each of the worlds that made his friend: Peace’s boyhood house on Chapman Street, with its “weedy rectangle of lawn” and “five buckled stoop stairs”; the fiercely loving St. Benedict’s Preparatory School, where the boys sang school songs in the corridors; his neighborhood posse, whose dreams of college, wealth and stability slowly evaporate; the dealing underworld, which for Peace and many of his peers is the easiest, truest meritocracy they can see; Yale, with its suffocating levels of entitlement and the angst of many of its minority students. As a page turner alone, the story wins. It doesn’t need further selling, and I won’t spoil it. What is worth adding is that the book will be highly provocative, even irritating, to those who answer the problems of the American underclass with prefab ideological theories and solutions. It will force liberals to reconsider their aversion to talking about culture, habits, values and family breakdown as contributors to poverty. Poverty may be “structural,” as liberals like to say, but the structures worked for Peace, and still there was a brokenness to his spirit, “crippling emotional trauma” from the absence of his imprisoned father, and a rage of generations — a rage that cannot be explained by the physics of one life alone. Hobbs is particularly convincing on the idea that no level of achievement or external intervention can compensate for the lack of family.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 15:58:35 +0000