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Author Joshua Perry at WNHH FM: Truth found in fiction.
Seraphim
By Joshua Perry
Melville House Publishing
262 pages
Ben is not Joshua.
Ben grew up in a college town in Massachusetts.
Joshua grew up in a college town in Connecticut — New Haven.
Ben is a fictional public defender seeking to extract moments of approximations of justice amid the crumbling court system in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Joshua was a real-life public defender struggling to extract moments of approximations of justice amid the crumbling court system in post-Katrina New Orleans. Now back in New Haven (working as the state’s solicitor general), Perry, 46, wrote a newly-published novel that details the quest of a public defender — Ben — to extract moments of approximations of justice amid the crumbling court system in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Ben and Joshua have different surnames, kind of. Ben’s is Alder. Joshua’s is Perry. (He does have relatives named Alderman.)
For all their differences, their common journey makes Perry’s new novel, Seraphim, a penetrating look at the ethical land mines and challenges that public defenders, young people accused of crimes, and their families face in our broken criminal justice system. Every day. Every hour.
Written in the hard-boiled style of Raymond Chandler, Seraphim follows the case of 16-year-old Robert Johnson, accused (wrongly? unclear) of committing a high-profile murder. Summoning the spirit of David Simon’s Treme and The Wire, with spiritual-searching sprinklings of Roger Kamenetz, the story boils the big-picture dysfunction of institutions in urban America down to the smaller decisions individuals make when no easy choices present themselves.
For instance: Ben early on in the book disposes of a key piece of evidence. He’s willing to break the law in order to protect a teenaged client he believes has odds stacked against him. Spoiler alert: Bad move.
The power of the story rests in those smaller individual decisions. Ben wrestles with how much to reveal to his client, to his mother and father, to a witness. They, in turn, weigh how much to reveal back to him. At each step the reader (and characters) wonders: Who’s helping whom? Who has power, who has agency, in the relationship? While I enjoyed following the story of the murder case, I was drawn more deeply into those interactions between Ben and Robert and other characters in the book.
The presence of missing fathers looms above these interactions. Ben is still processing his father’s suicide. Robert’s often-absent father has a role to play in his son’s fate in the murder case if he so chooses. Both Robert and his father repeatedly ask Ben about his own family: Ben lies about being a father himself, reasoning that might help earn his clients’ trust.
Another spoiler alert: Bad move.
As with any lie, Ben has to keep adding lies to preserve the original lie. As any defense attorney will tell you, making up a story digs a hole in which you keep sinking deeper. The reader detects that Robert and his father had suspicions about Ben’s lie. Their continued questions about his family read as probes of his sincerity, and how much they could rely on him.
At a key moment, all the lines get blurred and lies comes to a head in a jailhouse conversation between Robert’s imprisoned father and Ben about how much information to reveal to Robert, and which arrested family member’s interests should be sacrificed.
“Robert might prefer to have his father alive and well.”
“That’s my decision.”
“Whether I help you or not isn’t your decision.” …
“You want me to ask if it was your son, what would you do? So you can tell about your son?”
“Mr. McTell —“
“You think you’re better than me because I’m a shitty dad, and you’re just a shitty liar?”
New Orleans is a main character of the book as well, intertwined with the story of a murder and quest for justice, as when Ben leaves the courthouse one night and heads home:
To his right was the city's downtown, guttering like a gas flame; to his left, Tulane Avenue ran lakebound past empty storefronts and motels used by heroin addicts and prostitutes. He stood there and saw the water rising up the steps of the courthouse, just as it did. He heard it spill into the cellar where they kept the trial evidence, amid plastic bags of cocaine and cash and rusted handguns. It was black and viscous like oil, and did not cleanse but poisoned. All along the avenue, the water left a line higher than his head on the empty buildings. He knew that, far from justice, the law is instead merely ritual; ritual is neither good nor evil but can celebrate or rehearse either order or disorder. Order, too, has no moral valence but ends in either or both oppression and equality. He knew that he was a celebrant in a religion without faith. He knew that the city might deserve what it gets for what it does on the backs of its people. He himself certainly did deserve it, whatever it would be. ...
Author Perry had to make his own fateful decision in telling the story about what a public defender sees and what young criminal defendants face in New Orleans’s court: Whether to write a fiction or a nonfiction book.
Authors often face that challenge in writing their early books. (Seraphim is Perry’s second novel, the first he has published.) Writing a memoir would feel more believable — if you can tell the full story without violating people’s confidences. Writing a novel allows you to tell the full story with all the details without violating people’s confidences — as long as you do it right. Simply changing names or thinly disguising details of real stories is a cheap out.
Perry chose the fiction route. And he chose not to wrap the book around a version of a real defendant whose case he took. He thought long and hard about the whirlwind decade he spent in the turnstile of New Orleans injustice — then fully invented both a narrative and a set of characters.
That’s what he told me when I interviewed him on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program Tuesday, the day the book was released.
“There was no way to tell the truth writing nonfiction. When you take on the representation of a person who is accused of doing something really serious, and you come to meet them at what is, for many of them, the worst moment in their lives — you ask them to tell you about the worst thing that they’ve ever been involved with, whether they did it or no. This experience is a profoundly shattering experience for them. The thing that you owe them without question is loyalty, and part of that is privacy,” Perry said.
“So while I was sketching out the book, I did do some sketches of real cases that I remembered to recapture the feeling of it. To recapture something about the environment, the atmosphere, the geography. But I scrubbed those out of the story very carefully. The stories of my clients are not my stories to tell. So the only way to tell the truth in my mind was to write fiction.”
In the process, Perry told the truth, as he lived it. That’s an important true story to tell in 2024, from New Orleans to New Haven to overcrowded, under-resourced courthouses across our country.
Click on the above video to watch the full conversation with New Haven author Joshua Perry on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of Dateline New Haven.