Patrick Radden Keefe is the author of six books; his latest, The Son of the Oligarch, has been among the bestsellers in the English-speaking world since its publication a few months ago. This novel tells the story of the Brettler family, a London family, whose youngest son Zac, nineteen years old, leapt from the balcony of a luxury apartment belonging to a man of dubious reputation and died. Now the book arrives in Spain through Seix Barral, and Patrick Radden Keefe explains that for the first time in many years of investigating cases and writing for The New Yorker he has had to undergo therapy; as a father of teenagers, he admits he panicked.
In a meeting with journalists, he has regarded the book as the “best” work he could produce and he feels very proud of the final result, though he has not overlooked that one can never be sure if readers will connect with the work. “All the things that have happened since the book’s publication have been positive for me, but it is true that I feel a responsibility toward the Brettler family, as if I must look after them, because this story for them has been like a roller coaster.”
One of the mysteries he wanted to unravel when he sat at the computer, besides exploring the London that lies beneath the gloss of a world capital, was answering the question: “Why would a boy who has everything want to be the son of an oligarch from Eastern Europe? Why invent a new identity at merely eighteen years old?” In contact throughout with Zac’s parents, Matthew and Rachelle, whom he warned from the outset that he would depict details they would not like, he pulled at various threads, maintaining that the young man, dazzled by powerful older men, ended up “absorbed” by the very city of London.
Efe / Marta Pérez
Regarding who bore responsibility for his death, the writer says he is “clear” that two other people who pretended to be what they were not, Verinder Sharma and Akbar Shamji, “had a part of the responsibility, although they did not push him from the balcony.” He also notes that with a different kind of police investigation and with a different level of media scrutiny than there was, the case would probably have taken other twists.
In Patrick Radden Keefe’s view, this story is not divorced from the way a figure like Donald Trump rose to ultimate power in 2016 and that “there is a type of con artists who reach the top of power and who are the figures that define our era.” The same way Zac perhaps believed that if you want to reach power, what you have to do is lie. The fascination many teenagers feel for these wealthy, semi-gangster types who are consumed through social networks is something I thought about a lot while writing the book, although the work does not have a thesis.”
Asked about the current state of the media, Keefe has defended that most “abandon what they have always done well,” which is to go to the “depth” of issues rather than staying on the surface. “What we have to do is earn people’s trust day after day and, once we have it, this is what must continue to be defended. When it is explained that articles are generated with artificial intelligence, I think this is madness and that the person doing it is only going to end up losing their job.”
Regarding new projects, he joked that, for now, it is impossible because he has been on a world tour for half a year with The Son of the Oligarch, which he partly wrote in Barcelona during a two-month residency in 2024. However, he did drop that the production company A24 has a project in progress to turn the book into a series and that he, once the presentations are finished, will travel to South Africa for an article in The New Yorker about the legacy of apartheid. He also has plans for a book about Guatemala, in addition to continuing a podcast he started in 2020.
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Source: Irene Dalmases, Efe