The Mole People: one big underground party

The Mole People is a book about the homeless who inhabit the subway and train tunnels of New York City. In it Toth explores the loose groups and societies built up by the people in the tunnels, what sent them into the tunnels and why they stay.

While this book is well written, intriguing and a good read, it does not seem like a very good example a proper ethnography. 

The author certainly put enough effort into investigating her subject, but when she presents the material it is often difficult to determine where specifically the stories she relates are coming from. Sometimes it is obvious that it comes from first hand experience, such as her interviews with Bernard, where other times it is impossible to tell who the story is coming from, for example the piece on the group of graffiti artists and their attempt to tag an entire train. In such cases she weaves in a huge amount of description, but it is hard to believe that all this detail could possibly have been related to her. 

I would argue that the artful story telling is both the most compelling aspect of the book as well as the most bothering. It gives the entire book a feeling of a loose interpretation of what she learned and felt, with poetic license taken where detail is sparse. Unfortunately this makes it difficult to tell what true, what she actually observed, and what is hearsay and stories she learned about in her dealings with the tunnel dwellers.

If she was indeed trying to create a compelling argument about how these tunnel dwellers see themselves and how they want to be treated, it is undermined by the way she presents itself. However if we see her book instead as an evocative narrative which gives a general feeling about what a tunnel dweller's life is like then perhaps these shortcomings are not a problem at all.