The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace

This is an extraordinary, haunting story of the ultimately doomed life of Robert Peace, strung together from the recollections of his family, friends, lovers, classmates, and teachers. Born into tough circumstances, he grows up a driven, capable student, athlete and friend, almost solely due to the sheer force of will of his mother. He sets off to Yale with so much hope, yet finally cannot (or will not?) escape the world he came from, maintaining a fluidity with street life that proves to be his demise.

This was a tough book to read, as it exposes in a single life story how difficult it is to overcome entrenched poverty (and, to a lesser extent, racism). Even when so much went right for Rob, it still all went wrong at the end. I'm no expert on it, but the New York Times' review of the book is enlightening: 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.

Of course, Rob himself is not without blame. His choices are mysterious, confounding, more and more frustrating as he gets older and fails to learn from previous mistakes, and it is the interaction of these choices with the realities of his circumstances that make the book so fascinating. Chief among these bad choices are his recurring stints selling drugs as an easy, familiar way to make money. Hobbs spends a lot of time talking about how Rob wanted to be “The Man” - supporting everyone around him emotionally and financially, while at the same time failing to look after himself or accept advice of any form. He also harps on Rob's consistent undercurrent of anger, repressed and undirected, that slips out from time to time.

However, I don't believe this fully explains his failure to “succeed” after college. The expectations of a young person attending an elite university are so high - built up by those one knew in high school, and by the universities themselves - that there is bound to be disappointment on the other end. Very few people have career success right out of college, and the contrast between that and the feeling of being on top of the world as a successful high school senior is crushing (even more so I imagine in Rob's situation). I wonder if Rob was more scared to actually try something (and probably fail at it at least once) than not try at all, and so he spent his time traveling, working low-wage jobs, and dealing drugs.

Unfortunately (in so many ways), we never get to hear from Rob. Hobbs talks a lot about how private, how compartmentalized his life was, and although it seems like he's done the best job possible trying to illuminate all parts of it, I spent most of the book wondering what Rob would have said about his own decisions and path in life.

It's weird and uncomfortable to be a well-off white person reading a book written by a well-off white person about growing up black in the ghetto, a topic which neither of us has any firsthand experience with. There are some pretty hateful reviews on Goodreads ranting about this. I cannot know how much I don't know, but I thought the book was pretty fair, and its creation absolutely felt motivated by the right things. Is he a flawed narrator? Yes. Does he admit as much in the book? Yes. Hobbs actually puts himself into the book for a fair portion, writing first-person about how he saw Rob (before he did all the research for the book). I am a little ashamed to admit it, but it actually helped me relate to the entire work better, realize how little I know and how much was under the surface that if I had met Rob I would have never picked up on, due to no shared cultural context. I want to read more stuff like this, especially from the black perspective (as many reviewers have suggested). It's hard to understand the cycle of poverty without hearing individual stories like this.

Docked a star for some pretty crummy writing at parts. The section on Rob's childhood was incredible, a modern fable, but I felt like the author got sloppy after that. The book should have been cut down and there were some lazy word choices. At the end, it felt like a string of third-person interviews, rather than an intermixed narrative.

I hope Rob Peace and his story remain with me for a long time. There is much to learn from this man's life and the way he lived.

The last two sentences from the NYT are haunting: We are the wondrous country that made him a Yale man. We are the wanting country where even that wasn't enough to spare him.