|
The Alienist
By Caleb
Carr
Random
House, 496 pages, $29.50
An
initial glance at Caleb Carr’s novel might make it look like either an
amazing stroke of luck or brilliant marketing. Take the manners and
distinguishing marks of 19th-century New York, combine them with
the tale of a rampaging serial killer and come up with a can’t lose
proposition: a novel hybrid of The Age Of Innocence and Silence of
the Lambs.
Caleb carr is a contributing editor at MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of
Military History and the author of a number of books on that subject. He
may be a marketing strategist par excellence, but that doesn’t
answer whether The Alienist is worth reading. And it is. The novel is
tightly plotted enough that it can be read in a single sitting. And Carr has
written the book well enough to make it something more than just an
expensively trashy jolt-a-thon. Not towering literature, or a tome that
belongs on a shelf of indisputable classics, but a stylish, engaging
thriller crafted with a few stylistic flourishes from the period in which
it’s set.
We
think of serial killers as a modern phenomenon, like smog or chronic fatigue
syndrome. But insane human beings driven by bloodlust and a complete lack of
normal ability to distinguish right from wrong are an old, old curse. The
story unfolds in New York City in 1896, affording Carr a range of settings,
social mores and characters that would not be possible had he set The
Alienist in more recent times.
The
first victim is an employee in one of the city’s boy brothels. Polite
society in the last century was reluctant to publicly acknowledge
homosexuality in any form. And if the city chose to believe there was no
such thing as homosexuality, the murder of an adolescent hustler would be
unlikely to receive much attention.
Carr has researched the period minutely, and takes great pains to recreate
New York’s various social strata during the 19th century. And he
is faithful to the period in other ways, including the voice he gives his
narrator.
The
story’s narrator, John Schuyler Moore, is a reporter for The New York
Times, and because of his paper’s standards and practices, can’t report
on the killing. But the city’s police department is run — as it was in real
life — by Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican committed to reform
(that’s just one of the instances in which the book is eerily prescient and
comments on the present through the lens of the past). Roosevelt is
determined to clean up the corruption that infects the city’s police
department. Always eager to try the most modern methods available, Roosevelt
enlists an eminent “alienist,” Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, to bring the infant
sciences of psychology and forensic pathology to bear on the case.
The
book’s title comes from the then-popular term for people like Kreizler:
“alienists” studied people alienated from themselves and from the society
around them That’s a decision that adds another layer of suspense to the
proceedings. Alienists were seen at the time as something akin to
witch-doctors: feared, mistrusted or openly despised. For that reason, the
investigation and pursuit of the killer have to be kept secret.
Carr offers glimpses of his characters — just deep enough to set the
reader’s mind off on a number of tangents even as the story continues to
unfold. The prose is efficient and evocative, if not poetic. There’s
sufficient craftsmanship that the book pulls you into its world and keeps
you there, noting some of the distinguishing landmarks of the world it has
created without distracting you from the proceedings. It’s like a runaway
horse-drawn hansom cab — The Alienist gallops headlong toward its
conclusion as you hang on for dear life. |
