Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker.
Mr. Keefe is himself a witness: entering the narrative discreetly, attending court proceedings, poring over research materials, interviewing sources. His glimpses of people under stress are keen and often poignant, and his own discoveries can be profound ... Each of these stories could make a book in itself, not to mention an engrossing feature or documentary film ... [Keefe] does pay his unique subjects the compliment of his world-class attention, in works of deadline prose that shock, inform and entertain.
Taken separately, each piece offers a portrayal of rogues variously defined, ranging from the overtly criminal to the lovable (in the case of chef Anthony Bourdain). Taken together, the essays reflect the collective preoccupations of the unsettling era in which we now live: mass shootings and terrorism, unaddressed mental health issues, and the many flavors of financial corruption ... Judged solely by the severity of their crimes, many of the lawbreakers are overtly despicable. Yet while not excusing their misdeeds, Keefe nonetheless manages to highlight the humanity and contradictions in their lives ... Intimate characterizations are at the heart of Keefe’s writing ... A book largely about highly publicized rogues and those engaged with trying to entrap them, Rogues is a fast-paced and frequently suspenseful read. While the often-high-profile crimes committed are familiar, Keefe is a virtuoso storyteller, able to create suspense with his descriptions of how those crimes unfolded. There is a feeling in many of the essays that, given the smallest of detours, events might not have happened as they did ... reveals much that is troubling about our world today: the challenges of international cooperation, the ill-gotten gains of obscenely wealthy individuals, and the intractable presence of terrorism and mass shootings. The overwhelming impression from these essays is that justice in our violent, turbulent world is fragile and elusive. Fortunately, there is no shortage of individuals engaged in lifelong crusades to pursue it or, in the case of Keefe, to write about it.
At one point, when Keefe scrutinises a few thriller novels Bishop had written years ago for clues, you can’t help but admire a preternaturally attentive reporter at work. In another unforgettable moment, he gets Bishop to admit that in the months before she went on a shooting spree, she often broke out in hives worrying about her career prospects ... Keefe may travel the world over to unearth facts and investigate allegations, but his fidelity is strictly to the story; anything erratic gets left out. The genre has its formulaic flourishes and Keefe doesn’t always avoid them in this collection ... Then there is the nut graph that dutifully surfaces in the opening pages of every new piece, the story striving to impress on you its newsworthiness, which might have been necessary in the magazine version, but feels oppressive years later in a book. But the indiscriminate use of omniscient narration is perhaps the most infectious of Keefe’s offences ... These questions are exhaustively explored, but Keefe doesn’t provide any pat answers. He illuminates how in the end we sift through a bulky catalogue of evidence and settle for the most plausible story.
