“If we don’t fight, then what are we doing?” — Jeff Boyd
How do you write fiction about contemporary America when reality itself is stranger than fiction? A country in which “alternative facts” is policy rather than satire. Where “truth” has been nationalized.
Jeff Boyd, an acclaimed young American novelist, sees fiction as refuge. For both writer and reader, it gets us inside the heads of people who both inflict and endure pain. And it enables the senseless to make sense. The news cycle can’t do that. A novel can.
Boyd’s second novel, Hard Times, out today, is his latest attempt to make sense of the senseless. No, the title isn’t Dickensian — it’s from Curtis Mayfield. The song on the 1975 “There’s No Place Like America Today” album, with its cover juxtaposing some happy Americans in a car with others waiting miserably in the unemployment line. America might be great — but for whom, exactly? That dichotomy shapes Hard Times, which is set in a school on the South Side of Chicago where an innocent student gets shot and nobody can agree on what happened or why.
Is the American Dream over? Did it ever exist? Boyd isn’t quite sure. “As much as it feels impossible,” he says, “some part of me always wants to believe.” His characters fight — backs against the wall, cards stacked against them, but they don’t give in. Very Chicago. That’s what Curtis Mayfield was singing about in 1975 and it’s what Jeff Boyd is writing about in 2026. The times are hard. A time, once again, for novelists to seize back reality.
