"Seraphim" by Joshua Perry, Melville House Publishing, 272 pages
A “60 Minutes” report by Anderson Cooper in 2017 chronicled the seemingly hopeless state of the New Orleans Public Defenders Office.
A staff of 52 lawyers overwhelmed by more than 22,000 cases per year.
Arrested persons languishing in jail, literally defenseless, denied their constitutional right to legal representation.
Innocent individuals coerced into plea deals.
Others, including some charged with violent crimes, released for a lack of effective counsel.
The city’s then-chief public defender, Derwyn Bunton, likened the criminal justice system to a “criminal processing system” before drawing an unfortunate comparison to the famous “I Love Lucy” chocolate factory scene.
The court system, in his telling, acts as a malevolent conveyor belt, offloading arrested individuals directly into prison.
“It is not about figuring out at any point your innocence,” Bunton said. “Make no mistake, we are destroying lives.”
That criminal processing system is the subject of “Seraphim,” a remarkable and revealing debut novel from Joshua Perry — a former Orleans Parish public defender who now works as Connecticut’s Solicitor General.
Like many legal thrillers, “Seraphim” begins with a murder. Sixteen-year old Robert Johnson has confessed to shooting a beloved, post-Katrina recovery leader, the “Queen of St. Roch.”
His court representation falls upon Ben Alder, a greenhorn public defender who is bitter and alienated after just two years on the job, though he’s unsure if the work’s to blame.
“He didn’t know whether it was that the work attracted damaged people,” Perry writes, “or that it damaged people.”
Joshua Perry, former Orleans Parish public defender and author of debut novel, 'Seraphim.'
He also has his doubts about Robert’s confession.
Ben’s plan is to lay bare Robert’s life, “to mine it for details that would prove he was not himself a person who could think and act” as he stands accused.
That life, those details are a lesson in cruelty and terror — a typical story for so many New Orleanians.
Born at Charity Hospital and raised in the Magnolia Projects, Robert received his first child protective services welfare check at age 5, when a teacher noticed the telltale sign of rat bites. He attended four elementary schools prior to Hurricane Katrina — all now closed, Ben notes — and failed seventh grade while exiled, post-storm, in Memphis, Tennessee.
His record shows three prior arrests. Robert’s father, who Ben also represents, contrary to a possible conflict of interest that eventually arises, is also in jail, arrested for the umpteenth time for stealing copper out of an abandoned school.
That’s not the only legal misstep Ben makes. He disposes of evidence, puts his co-counsel’s life in danger, and repeatedly lies to clients, telling them he has two young children, in order to gain their trust. Ben lacks, it’s safe to say, the emotional intelligence we might expect from those who represent society’s so-called indigent.
Set in 2008, this public defender procedural is a mean portrait of the post-Katrina years that feels just as resonant today.
In tough, economical prose — think David Simon over John Grisham — Perry smells a rat lurking in every corner of New Orleans, a city he calls “an archipelago of misery,” where endemic violence and systematic racism rule.
Robert’s charter school — like all the rest — is staffed by “carpetbaggers” endeavoring to earn their “combat stripes without ever going overseas and with most of the comforts of home.”
The public defenders are carpetbaggers too, the Massachusetts-born Ben admits: “nothing is holding us here.”
There are numerous tales of eccentric judges and rotten cops. A Napoleonic-statured, “moral leper” of a district attorney with a penchant for offering ruinous plea deals.
And a 10-year-old kid, handcuffed in a jail cell — only coloring books can get him to stop crying. These details make “Seraphim” feel at times too insider-y to be completely fabricated (and might make a reader wonder how closely the author’s decade of experience as a local public defender hews to Ben’s).
Even Robert Johnson’s own name, which the character of course shares with the famed, crossroads-soul-selling bluesman, is up for a meta-critique.
“Nobody really knows anything about his life. He’s a mystery,” Perry writes of the musician, but also, ostensibly, of the reader’s relationship with the fictionalized Robert Johnson.
“That’s why White people love him. He’s romantic and blank.”
Robert might also represent one of the titular seraphim, the six-winged angels, who, according to scripture, encircle God’s throne singing “Holy, Holy, Holy.” References to these celestial beings pop up repeatedly in these pages, sending me scouring the internet for images of heavenly hosts.
In some art and texts, the seraphim keep two wings folded over their eyes — much like the blindfolded figure of Lady Justice — to refrain from coming face-to-face with the glory of God, the deity they both love and fear.
What a perfectly distilled metaphor of the relationship anyone who loves New Orleans has with this city. Open yourself to its beauty and risk seeing the horrors.
As “Seraphim” twists its way toward a conclusion, Ben learns to accept that there is no resolution, just the promise of a never-ending cycle of violence. But the novel does offer an appeal to the better angels of our nature. New Orleans and we New Orleanians contain so much promise.
“It could be better,” Perry ponders, “so why isn’t it?”
Joshua Perry will be signing copies of his book at the Garden District Book Shop, 2727 Prytania St., at 6 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 9.
Rien Fertel is the author of four books, including, most recently, “Brown Pelican.”