As the title of the astonishing book “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace” makes clear, life did not turn out well for Robert Peace. But was it a tragedy of inevitability, or a tragedy of possibility?
As a 3-year-old in day care, Peace was so precocious that he was known as The Professor. His hard-working, devoted single mother got him into an excellent Jesuit school. His father worked with him on his schoolwork and penmanship, until his father went to prison for murder — with evidence so unconvincing that the judge questioned it.
Academically gifted, Peace didn’t need to use a calculator until college, and read novels like “Light in August” for fun in junior high. He was a gregarious water polo player and the star of his class, so that after a wealthy banker heard him deliver the senior class keynote address, he promised to finance the boy’s college education.
When Peace left his dangerous neighborhood slum outside Newark for Yale, he met his freshman roommate, Jeff Hobbs, who grew up a few hours from Peace in a house with a pool outside Philadelphia. After a bumpy start, the pair — one the son of a drug-dealer in prison and the other the son of a doctor — developed a deep friendship. They roomed together through four years at Yale until they graduated in 2002.
Hobbs married — Peace was in the wedding — and moved to Los Angeles. He was shocked to receive a Facebook message from one of Peace’s Newark friends informing him that Peace was dead.
After the funeral, Hobbs set out to explain what happened to his old roommate. He talked to everyone he could find in Peace’s orbit, including his mother, his teachers, friends and girlfriends. Hobbs won writing prizes at Yale, and wrote one well-reviewed novel, but his real gift is for understanding the rich emotional lives of those in Peace’s orbit and, most of all, Peace himself.
“The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace” is not a sanitized version of a life. It’s the real version. Though Peace loved academics and studied molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale, he returned to Newark to buy marijuana to sell on campus, and then went on to become a street dealer.
Yes, Peace was self-deceptive and a dope dealer. But he was also a really smart guy who couldn’t seem to sustain romantic relationships, lived in two worlds, took care of people and was capable of deep friendship. When he spiraled down, nothing could stop his descent.
After reading this book once, I read it again looking for turning points when things might have turned out differently, hoping that maybe I could keep him alive a little bit longer. And I realized that in special cases, inevitability and possibility are not mutually exclusive.
“The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace”
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By Jeff Hobbs, Scribner, 406 pages, $27