Bob Moyer reviews a thought-provoking, haunting novel about justice – and lack of it – in New Orleans.

Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer

SERAPHIM. By Joshua Perry. Melville Press. 272 pages. $18.99

In post-Katrina New Orleans, a woman, a local legend, is shot and killed on the street. Sixteen-year-old Robert is arrested and confesses. Except it’s not feasible, and his lawyer doesn’t believe him. And that’s the beginning of this atmospheric, moving condemnation of the corrupt judicial system of New Orleans.

Ben Alder and his partner Boris are carpetbagging lawyers descending upon New Orleans to “help” after Katrina. They join the public defenders’ office, where they “…thought they could do better, new organs transplanted into the sick body with no mind paid to the toxicity and rejection.” Encountering a corrupt system, fickle judges and an overflowing docket, they must choose their battles carefully. Robert is one of those battles.

Ben and Boris employ legal and illegal, ethical and unethical means to extract Robert from the system. They succeed only in enmeshing him further. Ben, a dropout rabbinical student, draws parallels throughout the story with his religious training, “…that far from justice the law is instead merely ritual. He knew that he was a celebrant in a religion without faith.” He likens the confusion of his clients listening to the language of justice with Jewish congregants and their relationship with Talmudic interpretations. As he labors to solve the mystery of whether Robert committed the murder (with no help from Robert), the tragedy takes on even more Biblical proportions, Ben equating his role as Isaiah with the fallen angels, the seraphim. The tragic arc of the story delivers Robert further into the system, and moves Ben from hopeful hero to perpetrator.

The author carries us deep into devastated neighborhoods, abandoned buildings, abandoned lives illustrating that New Orleans, a “…shallow city, has deep subbasements of cruelty and fear. It grows squarely over its foundations.”   New Orleans, “…a city that suddenly stopped getting bigger but never stopped pulling apart,” defeats Ben, who packs his carpetbag and drives off at the end of the book. A haunting read, Seraphim will leave images in the reader’s mind long after the book is finished, and long before any of the inherent injustices are remedied.