Book Review: Run in the Fam’ly By John J. McLaughlin
Run in the Fam’ly By John J. McLaughlin, University of Tennessee Press, Hardcover, 2007, 292 pages, $32.95
This is one desperate novel. The book opens as the Robertson family heads from Chicago to California in a pickup filled with whatever belongings they have crammed onto the worn vehicle. Here Jake Robertson, the novel’s anti-hero, is just a kid, the youngest of the three children. Jake, his mother, and two older sisters are often on the receiving end of psychological and physical violence dished out by Curtis, the patriarch of this impoverished Black family.
They wind up in a ramshackle house in Oakland. Curtis embarks on periodic criminal endeavors while his furious temper makes for an oppressive domestic environment punctuated by outright abuse. Eventually this simmering rancor explodes in a brutal confrontation between a now older Jake and his drunken father. Curtis lands in Folsom Prison, and the family gradually disintegrates, all going separate ways.
Jake is on his own with little more than a grim determination to avoid becoming like his father. He doesn’t use drugs and doesn’t drink much, but his few social connections are either scamming or surviving from one subsistence check to the next. His neighborhood is a distressed grid of urban blocks, a veritable prison without bars which Jake, and many others who comprise his turbulent, social milieu, seem incapable of escaping: “Right here in Oakland, the Flatlands, wrong side of water, wrong end of the bridge. It’s all different for me now – I’m a working man, I found me a girl, and I’ve got a son of my own – but some shit ain’t changed at all.”
One day, that aforementioned girl, a young and intelligent Black woman, strolls into the day labor facility where Jake and others jostle for low paying temporary jobs: “She’s pretty like you write a song about – cream coffee skin and not too thin, and a smile I could feel before she even flashed it, first time I met her, down at the labor hall.” Noel is her name, and she’s able to navigate the broader – predominantly white – society, a world that seems impenetrable to the angry and ever suspicious Jake: “She ain’t like you and me, Jake, ain’t from down here,” a friend says.
Noel has her own burdens, but she is someone who could move on to a better life. She and Jake become partners, and they soon have a son who Jake adores. Though he craves for a decent life for his family, Jake is often without a job, while the jobs he does get are laborious and pay little. His impulsivity and pent-up emotions make matters worse.
Much of the dialogue in Jake’s narrative crackles of the hard scrabble streets: “Running, hustle-stepping, moving – got to get there. Trying to beat the clock but need to keep my breath too, because nothing gets you the shit jobs at the hall like looking like you’ll take them.” There are moments of love, humor, and tenderness, but those are frequently overwhelmed by an atmosphere charged with anger and violence. The raw and often profane language that permeates this story intensifies the sense of rage, confusion, and desperation that pervades the lives of many poor and marginalized individuals. Jake’s truculent journey, limned powerfully by the book’s local author John J. McLaughlin, is one that deserves attention.
There is no neat happy ending here. A glimmer of hope lies with the only real love Jake has ever known, in the persons of Noel and their baby boy. One hopes that Jake will find a path back to them and redemption. But at this story’s close, it is clear Jake’s travail is far from over.