Why People Can’t Ignore the Valuable Truth Found in Poverty Literature

A review of ‘The Trailer Park Rules’ by Michelle Teheux

My cousins lived in a house with cheap wood paneling. These were my “rough” cousins, and whenever I went to visit we’d end up wrestling until somebody cried, bled, or blacked out.

The worst times came when somebody got his head cracked so hard it sounded like a major league slugger had hit a home run. We’d wait nervously to see if the inert body would come back to life. Once it did, our terror turned into hysterical laughter. We cried tears of relief rather than joy.

“Wow, you were out cold!”

I never lost consciousness, but I remember being thrown into a wall so hard that I thought I’d bring the ceiling down. We all stopped and looked at each other with wide eyes, waiting for an adult to holler, “What’s going on?”

When no scream came, we checked for damage. My heart sank when I saw a dent, but one of my cousins used the suction cups from his dart gun to pull the panel back into place.

“Relax, they’ll never see it. Nobody ever looks that close.”

Indeed, that’s the whole problem.

These are the kind of stories that never seem to make it into movies or literature. We don’t talk about the terror a young child experiences when he rips his only nice shirt. Most people can’t comprehend the humiliating treatment good parents living in poverty have to endure in order to provide for their kids.

I suspect those stories are deliberately underrepresented. Perhaps knowing the truth would provide the necessary motivation to fix the world.

A community living in poverty

The Trailer Park Rules by Michelle Teheux is the story of a community of impoverished people living together in a park for mobile homes. The titular rules are dehumanizing in their pettiness. For example, residents who wish to save a few quarters by air drying their clothing are threatened with excessive fines.

When you’re broke, even a $5 fee becomes an act of terrible cruelty.

Of course the rules end with “this is a friendly place to live!” Those words ring with the same ominous threat that you feel when a doctor assures you it won’t hurt. Pain is, after all, the point.

From the first pages you can tell that Teheux is a writer with decades of experience. She weaves a fine tapestry of interlocking narratives that come together in the explosive conclusion. This is a book with an absolutely perfect closing line.

I recently reexamined In Our Time by Hemingway, which is a disconnected collection of short stories stitched together with poetic vignettes. Teheux’s approach is better. The lines between the stories are more effectively blurred and that helps to allow a richer and more detailed picture to emerge.

The sugar baby

I’ve lived in enough awful places, and seen enough terrible things to identify with many of the characters in the book. However, The Trailer Park Rules managed to fill in some critical gaps in my knowledge. In particular, the various ways systems of poverty target and exploit women.

Kaitlin is an attractive twenty year old who works at a strip club. There she meets Nathan, a wealthy engineer who has concluded he’s too much of an “alpha male” to settle for only one woman. Recognizing that Kaitlin is strapped for cash, he convinces her to sell him a half hour of her time every morning for a regular monthly stipend.

We get to see Kaitlin’s efforts to convince herself that she’s not giving up that much even as it slowly becomes apparent that the arrangement contains many unspoken expectations.

Her standing appointment makes it difficult to have a caring boyfriend. This causes her to push potentially good relationships away. It’s easy to identify with a character that is pressured to take the immediate benefit though it might entail a sacrifice in the distant future. Kaitlin’s situation is one you wake up from twenty years later and regret with all your soul.

As I watched this narrative play out, I gained some insight into why powerful people keep minimum wage low, and resist the idea of universal basic income. When women are in perpetual, inescapable poverty, it makes the price of human dignity and humanity much more affordable.

Student loans

Another family in the trailer park finds itself struggling because their source of student loans ran out before either of the parents were able to get their degrees. This left them in a worst case scenario where they have higher bills to pay without the benefit of a better income.

There’s a scene where the young mother has to plead her case to her academic advisor. The advisor is indifferent to the woman’s situation, and assures her she just has to “make a few sacrifices.” When the mother attempts to bring in the numbers to prove why this is impossible, the advisor loses interest.

There are many people in our society who feel entitled to believe that everyone who is struggling could get through their “bad patch” with only a little more effort. We rarely give too much thought to the idea that people actually are unfairly shoved into impossible positions.

We’ve normalized a skewed and entitled perception of reality. Maybe we’ll get lucky and never feel the consequences of an external squeeze, but there’s a good chance that a run of ill fortune will befall us eventually. I, for one, would prefer that we’d put out a safety net to catch the people I care about, and even those I don’t.

It pains me to think that my kids might one day get caught in a hole from which there is no escape.

Naturally, there must be a writer

Another character is Jonesy the struggling reporter. He’s working on a science fiction novel that provides a kind of bird’s eye view of Teheux’s themes.

In Jonesy’s novel, people escape into a happy memory by using a technology that makes it feel as if you are once again living that moment.

Jonesy is the type of character that set a goal for himself of making $30,000 a year by middle age, and failed. I think most people would be surprised at how many writers are like this. They are well-educated, thoughtful, intelligent, and broke.

I liked how Jonesy enjoyed the peace of sitting on his patio for a smoke. Writers are sustained by quiet moments of personal reflection. Maybe Jonesy will get his big break and sell his novel for millions of dollars. But even he knows that’s probably not going to happen.

The mercy of the wind

The difficulty in tackling a novel like this is figuring out an uplifting way for it to end without betraying the essence of the story’s fundamental themes. Although it might be more truthful to inflict misery on all the characters, that doesn’t make for an enjoyable read.

Teheux doesn’t fall into that trap. Instead, she finds ways for several of the characters to maximize their chance moments of good fortune. At least one of them recognizes that most people living in poverty are as helpless as a sailboat stranded at sea waiting on the the mercy of the wind.

Others assume that they made it out based on their ingenuity alone, which is to completely disregard the lesson.

Teheux’s perspective is underscored through the examples of the characters who succumb.

The advantage of the literate

We often talk about the poverty of writers, but the truth is that literacy represents one of the most significant boundaries in the pursuit of individual wellbeing. The stories of the illiterate are told even less often than the stories of impoverished writers.

I have experience with this.

I mentioned my “rough” cousins. Their father was illiterate. That was one of the main reasons why he and his children lived in a home with walls thin enough to put our shoulders through.

This is something I think about on the occasions when I’m faced with what seems like an impossible challenge. In moments of hardship, it’s important to reflect on the obstacles you’ve managed to overcome, and the help you experienced along the way.

Not everyone had the advantage of a mentor who taught them to read.

Imagine if every time we found ourselves reaching up for a helping hand, we took the time to reach down to provide one as well. In that way we could form an unbreakable chain of humanity so that everyone might rise.

We can’t afford to disregard the moments of pure panic that came as a consequence of looking out across a windless sea. Our humanity is forged within the crucible of helplessness.

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