On 'Settle In,' Patrick Radden Keefe and Amna Nawaz discuss 'London Falling'

Transcript

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Geoff Bennett: Patrick Radden Keefe is the author behind multiple nonfiction bestsellers. “The New Yorker” staff writer’s latest book, “London Falling,” is about the mysterious 2019 death of teenager Zac Brettler and his secret life.

Keefe spoke to Amna Nawaz for the latest episode of our PBS News podcast “Settle In.”

Amna Nawaz: There are so many complicated people in this book, right? But by tracing back their family stories and unpacking them the way that you do, you’re sort of forced to reckon with people as they are, right, full, complicated human beings with all the weight of their ancestors’ decisions on their shoulders and everything ahead of them as well.

Patrick Radden Keefe: Yes.

Amna Nawaz: For Zac in particular, though, what is it you hope people take away or understand about him? Because there’s a lot in there, right? There are questions about why he did what he did that we will never know the answers to. But what do you, as someone who’s looked into this for so long, what do you take away from that?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I — I mean, I the way that I write is not a — I trained as a lawyer, but I’m not writing legal briefs. The book’s not an op-ed. I don’t have a…

Amna Nawaz: You’re not arguing a point.

Patrick Radden Keefe: I don’t have an argument to make, per se.

However…

(Laughter)

Patrick Radden Keefe: Part of what’s interesting about Zac is, he’s this incredibly distinctive personality. He was a real sort of sui generis, unusual person who turns out to have been this amazingly talented, fabulous, who could kind of code switch and mix it up with people who work all the time with real Russian oligarchs and somehow trick them into thinking — I mean, there are Russians who he convinced that he was Russian.

Amna Nawaz: Yes.

Patrick Radden Keefe: I don’t know how he did it. So, on the one hand, he’s this very distinctive kid.

On the other hand I think that the siren song that pulled him into some of these dark places is one that many of us would recognize. It’s a culture that venerates wealth above all and venerates hustle, even when the hustle is illegal potentially and immoral and could end in catastrophe.

And I don’t think that you — I don’t really touch this stuff in the book because I think it’s implicit and you can kind of make these connections yourself.

But I think that, if you look around in our culture, in our political leadership, there are all kinds of examples of people who have chosen that kind of zero sum approach to life in which everything is about, I’m going to get mine, and it doesn’t matter who I hurt along the way or what I might be risking in the process.

There’s a kind of fire that’s sort of motivating people, and there’s an adulation I think in our culture of those “Wolf of Wall Street”-type characters. And I think the problem for Zac was, he didn’t see “The Wolf of Wall Street” as a cautionary tale. He saw it as an instruction manual.

And I do not think he’s alone in that regard. I don’t think it’s a generational thing either. I don’t think it’s just young people. I think across the culture there’s a lot of that out there. And so on the one hand Zac’s story is very, very distinctive. It couldn’t have happened to anyone else.

On the other hand there are aspects of this that I think speak to some kind of deeper ills in terms of where we are these days.