Hard Times Again? Jeff Boyd on Chicago, Charles Dickens and Curtis Mayfield

[00:00:00] Andrew Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen on America, the daily interview show about the United States.

[00:00:15] Andrew Keen: Hello everybody, it is Tuesday, the 17th of March, 2026. We live, and it won't come as any great news to many of you, in an age of hard times on lots of fronts. But it doesn't seem to be particularly new. Charles Dickens, of course, wrote his famous novel Hard Times back in 1854. The great American non-fiction writer and listener Studs Terkel wrote his Hard Times, an oral history of the Great Depression, back in 1970. And now we have a new Hard Times, a novel by my guest today, Jeff Boyd. Jeff is joining us from Brooklyn in New York. Jeff, congratulations on the new book; it's out today.

[00:01:05] Andrew Keen: Obviously there's a little bit of tongue-in-cheek in terms of the naming of your book, Hard Times. Everyone always thinks of Dickens. What's the reference of your new novel to Dickens?

[00:01:19] Jeff Boyd: Well, you know it's interesting. Maybe it's not—I don't know, I guess maybe being in America where most of my friends, they didn't really make that connection to Dickens as fast as I thought they would. I would say that for me, the connection is actually the song called "Hard Times" by Curtis Mayfield. And so in his album There's No Place Like America Today, that's actually where the title comes from, is from a Curtis Mayfield song. And then once I was aware, you know, I started to think about the Dickens reference probably after I was already kind of stepped to the title, and I thought it was apt to what the characters go through in the book. So, you know, it just kind of stuck.

[00:02:12] Andrew Keen: I'm going to try, Jeff, not to make too many "what the Dickens" jokes in this conversation. Your previous book was quite musical, The Weight, so the Curtis Mayfield reference isn't exactly surprising. Are we living, Jeff, in particularly unusual hard times, or are hard times always the narrative, doesn't matter what year, whether it's 1854 or 2026?

[00:02:44] Jeff Boyd: I would say, I mean for me personally and maybe a lot of other people feel the same way, I feel like we've kind of swung back into what I would consider to be hard times. So, you know, I think kind of coming out of what for me was more of like this kind of pie-in-the-sky Obama era. You know, I guess some people thought that was hard, but for me that was maybe a more joyous and hopeful time. Whereas the characters in the book and maybe in my own perception of the world, I do feel like we're maybe going through a—I guess, yeah, kind of a fall back into these hard times. Either whether we're talking about geopolitically or for the characters in the book who do go through a particularly tough moment that I try to capture.

[00:03:40] Andrew Keen: The Curtis Mayfield song you mentioned is from 1975, another period which people look back to of hard times. Some people compare the 70s and the 2020s. I'm guessing, Jeff, you're a bit young to remember 1975.

[00:04:00] Jeff Boyd: I am. Yeah. But I did, you know, I do—I am particularly interested in that history, especially in Chicago. And I think you saw like even that picture you were showing, it says "There's no place like America today," kind of showing that juxtaposition between those kind of happy people in the car maybe in the 40s and 50s and the people kind of waiting—I think they're waiting at like an unemployment line. So it's that dichotomy between those two. This idea that America's great—which I do think we say a lot now, how great America is—well, I don't know if I say that, but people say how great America is and how great the economy is.

[00:04:47] Andrew Keen: Yes, some people say it, Jeff. Not everyone. A lot of guests on this show are a bit skeptical of that.

[00:04:54] Jeff Boyd: I can see that. Whereas you have, you know, an uptick in unemployment. So it's almost kind of hard to see how they justify those things. But I think a lot of, you know, the average person, a lot of people would say that we are going through harder times where some people might want to act as if we're living in a more prosperous time. I don't know who it's prosperous for, maybe the 1%, but you know, for the majority of us I do feel like we've slid back into less joyous and less hopeful moments.

[00:05:32] Andrew Keen: It's interesting, the Curtis Mayfield song comes with an image of a car. Of course we live now at a time of inflation, oil wars, price hikes, so history in some ways is repeating itself. This is a question, Jeff, I often ask novelists and people who write books about contemporary America—and of course we'll come to a more detailed description of what you're writing about in the America of the 2020s—but given everything that's happening in America, from Trump to Minnesota to Black Lives Matter to so many other things, how does a novelist make stuff up given that reality itself is so incredible? So, what some literary theorists might call versions of hyper-reality. Were you sometimes, when you sat down—I know this is your second novel after The Weight which was highly acclaimed—did you sometimes think to yourself, well, what's the point of being a novelist, might as well write non-fiction because it's hard to make this stuff up?

[00:06:46] Jeff Boyd: Yeah, you do—I do kind of reach those moments. I think especially when I was drafting this book, I would have, you know, where the headlines would seem so sensational. And I guess, you know, borrow a term like "stranger than fiction." It was kind of hard to feel like sometimes as a novelist that I could keep up with that, the craziness that actually is happening in this world. But I do think that also, the kind of—maybe I think a lot of writers feel this way—is that it seems so senseless what actually occurs that it's nice to have these moments, or at least in a fictional way, to try to find the actual truth or an answer. To try to get into the heads of the people who are making these horrible decisions or in the heads of people who maybe have been the recipient of lots of pain and trauma, and trying to kind of parse out or better understand exactly what it is in the human psyche that brings one to either enduring or dying or inflicting pain.

[00:07:54] Jeff Boyd: So, I think sometimes it's almost a refuge I feel personally as a writer sometimes to be able to control something. To say, okay, these horrible moments occur, these things do happen—why do they happen? Can I make this all kind of make sense in a narrative way that will satisfy the reader and myself? Because I think that's kind of what's so hard, at least for me, when reading headlines or experiencing things—is that there's no simple answer. You can't find the answer and you almost wonder if you ever will. And so in fiction, the nice part is that I'm able to kind of play through all these scenarios with the idea that I can provide an answer to the reader and to myself.

[00:08:44] Andrew Keen: So you're a brave fiction writer, Jeff, in acknowledging that you're looking for answers. Often fiction writers say they're not looking for answers, they're just trying to describe their version of reality. I know your first book, The Weight, was slightly autobiographical—you have a musical background. And this book must be pretty autobiographical, or at least built on some of your autobiography because you were a school teacher in Chicago and this book is set in Chicago, in a school. So, how much of this is autobiographical, Hard Times?

[00:09:24] Jeff Boyd: Yeah, I would say it starts—I mean, it is based in a school much like one I taught at, in a neighborhood much like one I taught at. And some of the characters, you know, I would say live in the apartment I used to live in in Chicago. There's the suburbs of Chicago that I'm pretty familiar with. And so, I would say the most autobiographical part is that I could picture the streets that I'm talking about, that I can kind of see at least a stand-in for the characters that I'm writing about. And so, I would say it's not as autobiographical—I wouldn't say the first book's completely autobiographical, but I would say this one kind of pulls off of what I've known, what I do know, and then try to stretch myself. So, it's definitely more of a stretch, I would say, as I wrote this novel.

[00:10:18] Andrew Keen: So you talk, Jeff, about answers that you're trying to put forward in your new novel Hard Times. What's the question then that these answers are trying to address?

[00:10:31] Jeff Boyd: That's a good question. Because there's so many questions, I think, at any given moment.

[00:10:37] Andrew Keen: We don't have to have one. What are the series of questions? What are you trying to answer?

[00:10:43] Jeff Boyd: I guess a lot of it's the "why." A lot of it is, you know, I do have this kind of, at least when I was writing it, this kind of preoccupation with fate, I guess, and predestination, and how much of the things that happen to us are within our control. When I was in grad school, I had a good friend who—I grew up pretty religious, and so I think I kind of work against this idea sometimes that the world is ordained or that it's all set, the path is all set. You know, I'm very much about this individualism.

[00:11:18] Jeff Boyd: And I had a very close friend who kind of—I was kind of surprised that she's not religious at all, but she kind of had this kind of view that people are kind of destined to be who they are and go where they go because of the circumstances of where they've grown up, because of their family, because of the society that they're in. That you could kind of, if you wanted to, kind of draw a line between where someone starts and where someone's going to end. And so that kind of—I wanted to kind of push back against that as well. And I think my characters kind of do that as well, where you feel like there is this sort of like, "well, this kid grew up in this neighborhood, he has a broken home, he's on food stamps," that kind of thing. And so you think, "okay, that means that they're going to end up here." And I kind of wanted to have these characters who say, "no, that's not what I'm going to do," who kind of fighting against this kind of this concept of fate, which I think you see in a lot of literature—maybe classical literature as well—where especially a social novel, where people are set in a position and kind of a caste in a way and you see them fighting against it. So I kind of wanted characters who from the onset you might think that you know or believe where they're going to end up or what decisions they're going to make because of where they've started, and then seeing them kind of bucking that or either confirming it.

[00:12:49] Andrew Keen: There's an irony there, of course, Jeff—again, you don't need me to tell you this—as a novelist you're God. You're controlling these characters, you invent them, you determine their fate, their narrative. When you invent characters in your books, and particularly in Hard Times, did you know where they were going or did they surprise you, these characters?

[00:13:12] Jeff Boyd: Oh, they surprise me all the time. I have a hard time writing if I don't at least think I know where I'm going, but I don't hold myself to it. I don't work on an outline. Often times they'll have a conversation and someone will say something and I'm surprised by it. They'll do something I'm surprised by, and I'll say, "well, if this happens, that changes everything," you know, and then I have to work on the trajectory that the characters are bringing me on. And so I do kind of—I think a lot of writing is kind of play. You know, I feel like I'm kind of the same thing I did when I was a kid playing with my G.I. Joes or, you know, toys. It's like they kind of setting their own narrative sometimes and what I like is kind of this make-believe. And so the make-believe to me involves characters doing things that do surprise me as the narrator. And that's kind of the joy of it. I think if I sat down and always knew exactly what they were going to say and do, I wouldn't have been able to write the book, it wouldn't have been fun to me. And part of the fun is the discovery of having putting two different kinds of people together and seeing what happens.

[00:14:23] Andrew Keen: And do you think your characters are surprised by you?

[00:14:27] Jeff Boyd: Surprised by me? I don't know. I mean, I guess that kind of—I try not to be there, I think. My first book was, you know, first person, and so it was very much I was—I feel like I was in the driver's seat of what occurred and what happened. And in this one, I definitely tried to almost be this narrator and—I would almost say kind of like a journalist, where I'd have this idea that these things had occurred. Like, these moments have occurred, like this student was shot. I don't exactly know why they were shot, I don't know what factors were at play.

[00:15:02] Andrew Keen: And this is in a school in a Chicago school.

[00:15:06] Jeff Boyd: Yeah, in a school in Chicago. Yeah. I don't exactly know what factors were at play, but my job is to ask them questions, to discover, to interrogate, and then try to write it in a narrative form, like I said, in a way that does kind of make sense in the end. That has—you know, giving their actions or seemingly sometimes just random actions meaning as the story goes along.

[00:15:33] Andrew Keen: Dickens' Hard Times, of course, was a form of social realism, in some ways he invented the form. Some people liked it, some people were quite critical. George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Macaulay thought that he hadn't done a great job. Are you, or is this book Hard Times, in the Dickensian social realism tradition or is it different?

[00:16:03] Jeff Boyd: No, I'd like to think so. Yeah, I do think it's in that social realist—I've always thought of myself as a realist. I know I've never thought—not too interested in, you know, science fiction or in kind of inventing a world that doesn't exist. I'm very much try to stay in the world as I understand it. And so I do think the things that happen to the characters and their lives are lives that I can believe myself are actually real and happen, or have happened. And so, yeah, it's a social—I would call it a social realist novel.

[00:16:40] Andrew Keen: Do you do a lot of research for it? I assume you read Studs Terkel's Hard Times. You obviously bring a lot of autobiographical research simply having taught in a Chicago school. But did you read quite a lot of history or Chicago local politics for this?

[00:17:02] Jeff Boyd: I did. Yeah. I mean also, I did also grow up with a father who is a police officer. So that was good—helpful for the police angle. You know, I could kind of go to him and ask him, "could this actually happen? Is this real? Like, how would they hold their gun here?" That kind of thing. But you know, I did pull from some moments. There's this Chicago Intercept kind of investigation called Operation Brass Tax, which is about a sergeant who started taxing local drug dealers and kind of controlling, you know, the flow and where they could sell drugs and, you know, he would arrest people who didn't pay. He would set people up, and it was kind of a larger conspiracy there, so I looked up that.

[00:17:51] Jeff Boyd: You know, there's moments of a student—or a kid who stole a car with another kid in Chicago and they got stopped and they both ran away and one of them got shot and the other one got away and the cops tried to figure out, "well, who was with you?" And the kid never told them. And the thing—the investigation kind of got swept under the rug, they never released the footage because the kid was a minor. And so I do—I did pull from kind of news articles and also from my imagination kind of running with that, like what would that—if I was to actually be able to follow this kid along, to follow these people along and actually hear and listen to everything that actually occurred, what could I imagine? And so there's a bit of research that kind of then pulled into my fictional world that I was trying to create.

[00:18:45] Andrew Keen: What are the stereotypes, Jeff, that you're trying to smash in this book? Maybe there aren't any. I read a headline on CNN recently about the radical reduction in violent crime. Many people in America, particularly outside the big cities, tend to—I think fetishize crime, obsess over it, and it's one of the sort of the consistently paranoid elements in American culture that there's always this terrible deadly rampaging crime everywhere, especially in places like Chicago. Were you trying to, in a way, address that? I mean this is a book about crime, it's a crime novel, but it's a form of social realism. Were you trying to calm America about what really happens in places like Chicago?

[00:19:42] Jeff Boyd: You know, I don't know if I was trying to calm it so much, but I guess I was trying to, I guess throw a different angle in there, or at least expand the angle. You know, I've grown up—I've lived in Chicago, lived in the suburbs, I've lived in Iowa, you know, and I've lived in places where people have said, "oh, you're from Chicago," as if I've just come out of some sort of war-torn country, they can't believe I've made it out of there—which I always found kind of humorous. And so I did play with that as well.

[00:20:11] Jeff Boyd: You know, I'd have people who would say, "oh, you're going back to Chicago? Be careful!" and I'm like, "why?" Like, you know. Or even living in New York, you know, I have family members who live in relatively small suburbs and they're always convinced that you just walk down the street and you're going to get shot or mugged or something. But I always, you know, I guess yeah, I guess I did kind of try to push back at that because I do see this, you know, kind of beauty and vibrancy and also just such diversity, you know, between blocks even. So there are places in Chicago that are tough that you might not want to walk in at a certain time of day, you know, but if you live there, you know that. So, but there's also very beautiful old history, there's the waterfront which I love, you know, Lake Michigan. There's the North Side, there's Hyde Park where I lived for a while, which is a historically kind of black neighborhood.

[00:21:13] Andrew Keen: Which is where Obama's from, isn't it?

[00:21:15] Jeff Boyd: Yeah, University of Chicago and Obama had a house there. I think he still might own a house there. And those are vibrant, beautiful places. And I think that if you don't live in that city—those cities—and you've never been there and you come in with this idea—preconceived idea of what Chicago is, you're going to miss out on a lot and you're also going to kind of look funny just walking around scared. Half of the problem people get messed with, I think, is because they walk around looking so out of place and so scared. I think if you walk into a place often times I find as if you belong there and respectfully, then people will see that and they treat you with that kind of respect. And so I have that with my characters as well, where they—I feel like they are people who know how to navigate where they live. And so, I mean horrible things do happen still and violence does touch a lot of these characters, but on a daily basis they also have moments that are pretty, you know, everyday American experiences. And so I wanted to show that as well.

[00:22:19] Andrew Keen: Yeah, and I know for you place is very important. You had a nice piece in Literary Hub—we used to publish this show on Literary Hub—"I would drive 220 miles to be a writer: On the real distance between Chicago and Iowa." Jeff, it's interesting that you mention that your father was a police officer, or is a police officer.

[00:22:42] Jeff Boyd: He was, yeah.

[00:22:43] Andrew Keen: A lot of the narratives, particularly on the progressive side, suggest that the police are the problem, especially in the inner city neighborhoods of Chicago. Is that another stereotype that you're trying to in some ways address in Hard Times, that the police aren't always the bad guys? I mean, you grew up with a father who was a policeman.

[00:23:10] Jeff Boyd: Yeah, I think there's so many complex reasons why someone gets into that job. I mean a lot of it is because it's the best job they can get. I mean it provides job security, it provides kind of a—sense of purpose. You know, a lot of the people who have become police officers go into it for good reasons. Part of it was, you know, when George Floyd died, you know the main cop was white, but some of the other cops were black, I think one was Asian. And I remember my family—I had family in Minnesota also. And so, you know, I was there reading the local paper some time after it occurred about one of the police officers who was black. He was talking about how his family were just so proud of him because he had a hard time in high school, he was directionless, and thank God he got this job for the Minneapolis Police Department. You know, and his family's proud, he was proud of his race, and kind of read about him, and then he's one of the people who stood by and did nothing. Which was of course a crime and makes him implicit.

[00:24:20] Jeff Boyd: But it made me think about that person. Who is he? Did he come in here with this idea that "oh, I want this guy to die"? I don't think so. There's so much complexity I think to any individual and I think that's what I really can't get past—I have a hard time looking at anyone as anything as like a monolith or saying all these people are bad or all these people are good. As a writer and as a person I really do try to think about the individual and the interiority of that person. And so, yeah, I would say that I don't walk—I'm not one of those people who can say that all of one kind of person is bad. Unless you're talking about Nazis or something. But I just don't have that in me. So I do think that one of the reasons I do have a cop character in this book is because I did want to show the complexities of him being a black police officer of wanting to do good, and maybe he gets caught up in some bad, but that's not what he set out to do. That's not where his heart is. And so that's kind of what I'm trying to explore in this book as well.

[00:25:27] Andrew Keen: You've taught school in Chicago, I know you're also—you still teach in Brooklyn. Set in a school, the main character is an English teacher. It's a tough job, Jeff, isn't it, teaching, especially in public schools in America? You're poorly paid, people don't respect you, the kids are often disrespectful to say the least. What were you trying to say in Hard Times about being a teacher in the America of the 2020s? I mean these are the heroes and they're not often acknowledged.

[00:26:05] Jeff Boyd: Yeah, I think it's—what I found being a teacher is it's even really hard to even be a mediocre teacher. It takes a lot out of a person, it took a lot out of me. Yeah, there's the grading, there's the dealing with the interpersonal problems with students, there's dealing with trying to work with their parents, there's all this stuff that's going on outside the school, outside of your control, and you're kind of this kind of caregiver and caretaker and you're a teacher and you're kind of like a—try to be like some sort of psychologist or something. You're the authority, you know, you're the—sometimes you have to break up fights and you have to do all these things just constantly. But you also have to make sure that you have enough pencils and you have to make sure you have enough copies for the next class and you have a lesson plan, and so you're just kind of wearing all these hats all the time. And I do feel like it is a job that's kind of under-appreciated and underpaid and supported. It's not easy to be a teacher and I think that Buddy in the story—the teacher that we follow—kind of has to go through all those things. And I did like and I did want to kind of be able to explore what it's like to be a teacher in the inner city or in a place like South Side Chicago.

[00:27:32] Andrew Keen: I mean, it's hard times for teachers. Maybe it's always been hard times, but particularly these days, isn't it? I mean, they're so badly paid and disrespected.

[00:27:43] Jeff Boyd: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I guess it was hard for me. I decided at one point that I was going to go back to school and try to be a writer, see how that worked, because it's tough.

[00:27:57] Andrew Keen: I know your book is also about successful people who have money, and there's obviously the vivid contrast between them and the hard times of others. If you have money, is that a way out of hard times, Jeff, or is it more complicated?

[00:28:17] Jeff Boyd: Yeah, I think it's more complicated. I think it's always easier to have money, which we also see with some of the characters in this book. And I also—that was also the kind of the social aspect as I think about being black in Chicago. I think maybe some people think that everyone who is black in Chicago is poor or doesn't have a lot of resources. And I wanted to show also, you know, characters who are lawyers, characters who own businesses. Buddy is, you know, he's a teacher but his wife makes good money, so he's not—that's not his concern, he doesn't wake up concerned about how he's going to pay the bills. But then sometimes when you're not concerned about that, then you have other things that pop up. People have a certain bandwidth I think, and so sometimes that bandwidth is maybe it's all tied up in how are you going to make the day-to-day work, and others have maybe more space to try to work on other aspects. And so I think that's kind of what works for Buddy as well, is that he doesn't need to keep his teaching job because he needs to pay the bills, he needs to keep his teaching job because he wants a sense of purpose, because he feels like he can do a good job, because he believes in what he's doing. And so, yeah, I think money is only a part of it for anybody.

[00:29:43] Andrew Keen: Jeff, it's hard as a fiction or non-fiction writer these days to avoid the political. You mentioned Black Lives Matter and what's happened recently in Minnesota. America currently has a president, of course, who has a history when it comes to accusations on violent crime, the Central Park Five scandal, didn't seem to make much difference—he still was elected president. Is there a political dimension to this book, particularly in the context of MAGA and the current president?

[00:30:21] Jeff Boyd: Oh yeah, I would say so. It's hard for me to avoid. I am also someone who stays very kind of keyed into what's going on in the headlines and the news and the—like I said, I watch too much cable news. I've cut back recently for my mental health. But yeah, I mean I couldn't help but kind of have these kind of larger ideas about what's going on in our society, about what the truth is. I think the truth is a big thing that seems to have been kind of eroded. Especially with Trump, it was a lot about like alternative facts, right? It was like, okay, it's about who controls the narrative. And I thought a lot about that when I was writing this about—you may hear this, but the thing that we're seeing with our eyes is different from what we're hearing. And so how do we kind of square that?

[00:31:16] Jeff Boyd: The characters in this book, there is a lot of moments where they want to figure out what's true and what's not true, where someone says, "oh, he was shot because of this, this guy was there," and as a reader, we know that that's not true. What does that mean? And I do think that that was kind of—that played out a lot with this. I do think there is a little bit of a, to me—I think as a writer, like my characters are kind of players in this world, and the world that they're living in maybe is a smaller—you know, they're on the South Side of Chicago and their own interpersonal things. But for me, it is—I hope that it also can kind of spark these ideas about what is the world that we live in, what is the truth, who are the authority figures that we can trust, why, motives. And so I do try to play with all those ideas in the book.

[00:32:19] Andrew Keen: Final question—contemporary or indeed historical American fiction tends to always come back to one of the great questions, challenges, and opportunities in American history: the idea of the American Dream. Is this book Hard Times, is it a book about the end of the American Dream, its rebirth, its possibility, or its impossibility?

[00:32:48] Jeff Boyd: Well, as much as it feels impossible, some part of me always wants to believe. I don't know how else to get by. And I think that's how the characters feel too, they can't just lie down and say, "oh well, the dream is over, I'm done for." They fight, and I think of myself also as a fighter and I think that's also what Hard Times is kind of means to me in that Curtis Mayfield song we were talking about. That song is about all the hard moments that people are going through—the "cold eyes that are staring at them, people all around me and they're all in fear."

[00:33:34] Jeff Boyd: But still, the hopeful part about that song to me when I listen to it is it's still about fighting. It's still about saying, "yeah, like we have all the cards are stacked against us, but we're not going to lie down, we're going to keep on—we're going to keep on fighting for what we believe in, we're going to fight for a better day, we're going to fight for our families and for our neighborhood." And that's I feel the only way to get through—that's all we can do, I feel, as a society, as people, is to believe that there is a brighter day and that we—it might be difficult and it might be hard and it might seem impossible, but if we don't fight, then what are we doing? That's kind of the takeaway that I hope a lot of people have with this book is that they do see that these characters, no matter how much they're pushed back past their back's against the wall, they do find a way—at least some of them find a way to break through for the next—for another day. And to break through past what anyone might believe about them.

[00:34:42] Andrew Keen: The book is already being acclaimed, gotten starred review on Publishers Weekly. Maybe, Jeff, it should be called Better Times rather than Hard Times. It's out today, one of America's most talented and acclaimed young writers, Jeff Boyd. His second novel, the first one was The Weight, now we're onto Hard Times. Congratulations, Jeff, and we will look forward to discussing your third book when it's out. Thank you so much.

[00:35:10] Jeff Boyd: Thank you, Andrew.

[00:35:12] Andrew Keen: Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. And I'd be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.