Books discussed in this essay:

There Are No Children Here
by Alex Kotlowitz
Anchor Books, 305 pp.,  $14.95 (paper)

Random Family
by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Scribner, 404 pp., $16.00 (paper)

Nickel and Dimed
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Owl Books, 221 pp., (paper)

Myth of the Welfare Queen
by David Zucchino
Scribner, 350 pp., $25.00 (hardcover)

Nobody chooses to share a kitchen with roaches and rats.

No parent wants to block the living room windows with furniture to keep stray bullets from killing her child.

No one wants to live in a truck out behind the restaurant where they work; or spend a frigid winter night scouring the streets in search of a drug-addicted daughter who sells her body for a few dollars.

But that’s life for the Americans whose stories are told in these books.

Poverty is an enduring theme for nonfiction writers, from George Orwell’s 1933 memoir of slumming through Europe, Down and Out in Paris and London, to the recent bestseller about life inside one of New York’s (briefly) most successful drug operations, Random Family.

None of the writers of these books on poverty themselves rose from poverty. They are all highly educated, middle-class whites who come to these stories as outsiders, hoping to understand this foreign culture in their own backyard.

At times, it does seem like another world, a place where $100 can mean the difference between success and failure, where it’s understood that marriage isn’t necessarily an option. A little girl learns to stand on her own, and if that means using her sexuality to lure a wealthy man, or working 12 hours on nothing more than a bag of chips, or “going homeless” in a duplicitous attempt to get into the public housing system more quickly …  so be it.

These characters are the ultimate pragmatists. They can’t afford to be otherwise.

And so the writers who chronicle their lives take a similarly clear-eyed view, using a detailed portrait of one individual or one family, to bring their world to life. The daily minutiae of their lives — relying on a loan shark to buy Christmas gifts or coming together as a community celebrate a high school graduation — is what makes these stories sing.

It’s the small, universally human stories that make this foreign world comprehensible.

The storytellers are frequently journalists writing to contradict prevailing stereotypes with factual reporting. Zucchino takes his title from a Ronald Reagan-era PR stunt in which a woman was demonized for living the high life off a welfare fraud scam. That woman never existed, but Odessa Williams, a formidable grandmother who relies on welfare and trash picking to raise two generations of her family, is heartbreakingly real.

LeBlanc — whether it was her intent nor not — succeeds in shattering the glamour that surrounds the drug trade. These men and women (boys and girls, really) have the designer labels and fine French champagne of rap stars, but they pay the price. LeBlanc follows their rise and their fall, when prison time and the responsibility of children sap the flash and color from their lives.

Ehrenreich tackles the assumption that those who are willing to work can drag themselves up from the mire of poverty — a frequent argument during the welfare reform debates of the late 1990s. After working minimum wage jobs “undercover” in four American cities, she concludes that it’s nearly impossible to get by.

Koltowiz writes about Chicago in the 1980s, Zucchino describes Philadelphia in the early 1990s, Ehrenreich covers a broad swath of America’s working poor during in the 1990s, and LeBlanc captures life in the Bronx at the turn of the millennium. But over a 25-year time span, little changes in America’s inner cities.

Single mothers struggle to make ends meet within a broken public aid system that doesn’t provide contraception or reliable childcare. Men have vanished into gangs and drugs and, ultimately, prison. Children grow up too fast, committing adult crimes and bearing their own children long before they celebrate a not-so-sweet 16th birthday.

Each book — at first glance — is a touching portrait of a good woman ensnared in bad circumstances. However, these books rise above schmaltz precisely because they paint realistic portraits of flawed individuals who make bad decisions. Even the good guys (and gals) in these stories take drugs, drop out of school, and drift into gangs.

As a reader, you’re rooting for them to win; to somehow rise above the tragedy with a spelling bee victory, a community college degree, a brief stint in prison  — you hope desperately that this will be the triumph or the lesson that sets them on the right path. You’ve seen inside their lives. You care about these characters and you want to see them succeed.

But this is nonfiction.

LeBlanc’s multigenerational story is perhaps the most tragic, as you see the same problems — too many children too soon, too little support from the babies’ fathers —pass from mother to daughter, and you know that the bright-eyed little girls bouncing around the living room will be facing the same dilemmas in less than 10 years.

Taken en masse, the lingering problems and tragic endings of these books are simply exhausting.

But we continue to read these books because, despite logic, we’re still hoping for Horatio Alger. We want to — need to — believe that the American dream of rising from poverty by the force of will still exists. We read to understand people who, though they’re our countrymen, even our neighbors, live lives so foreign as to seem incomprehensible.

We also read these books for the least philanthropic of reasons — to feel secure in our middle-class world, to satisfy our curiosity without getting our hands dirty, without taking risks.

At their least successful, these authors show people suffering the consequences of their bad choices and living up to stereotypes, satisfying the worst in human nature.

But at their best, these books are an indictment of the social programs that supposedly exist to help this country’s poor transform their lives. They lay bare the class system that so many deny exists in America.

They show us the dark side of the American dream and subtly, but eloquently, demand change.