Murder and Psychiatry at the Turn of the Century
Welcome
to 1896. The art of police investigation means knowing how much to club a
suspect until he talks. Moving through Manhattan boulevards requires a keen eye
for pools of urine and horse manure. Psychiatrists are so sinister in the
public consciousness they are known as “alienists” and regarded with fear and
loathing.
It
is a bleak and dangerous time, even more so when New York City discovers its
own version of London’s Jack the Ripper on the loose.
Caleb Carr’s The Alienist offers a promising set-up and fine atmospherics. You really smell the gas coming off the lanterns as Carr eases into his fin de siècle milieu. Unfortunately, The Alienist is also plodding historical fiction built around a contrived mystery story that never quite comes together, the kind of book where Teddy Roosevelt says “Bully” a lot and a superhuman villain able to vault buildings like Spider-Man becomes a whimpering hulk with major mommy issues.
The pages do turn, though more from the thinness of the plot and at least one reader’s eagerness to get it over with quickly. Carr’s approach is highly factual, just not engaging.
Laszlo
Kreizler is the title character, a leading practitioner of criminal psychiatry
at a time when the practice was confined to insane asylums. His novel beliefs
set him in conflict with established religious and political dictates, but
earns the admiration of the president of the city’s board of police
commissioners, Theodore Roosevelt.
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| Theodore Roosevelt during his time as New York City's police commissioner, which lasted from 1895 to 1897. In The Alienist, he risks the anger of the mayor and other city leaders by enlisting the aid of a psychiatrist to end a murder spree. Image from https://untappedcities.com/2016/06/27/theodore-roosevelts-121-year-old-desk-sits-in-the-police-commissioners-office/. |
So
when children, mostly poor young boys eking out a living as prostitutes, are
gruesomely murdered near city landmarks, Roosevelt seeks Kriezler’s help, as
well as that of John Moore, well-to-do reporter for The New York Times and our narrator:
I could say that
in retrospect it seems that all three of our lives, and those of many others,
led inevitably and fatefully to that one experience; but then I’d be broaching
the subject of psychological determinism and questioning man’s free will –
reopening, in other words, the philosophical conundrum that wove irrepressibly
in and out of the nightmarish proceedings, like the only hummable tune in a
difficult opera.
The
Manhattan opera scene in the 1890s is one of several cultural touchpoints
referenced in The Alienist, a book
which really pushes the historical half of historical fiction. Historical
fiction is a wonderful thing; alas, the trick of writing it in a way so that
the reader doesn’t mind the history lesson isn’t Carr’s forte. There are times
you feel him straining to deliver some factoid he pulled from his day at the
New York Public Library or New-York Historical Society.
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| Author Caleb Carr, in 2018, from a profile in the Albany, New York Times-Union. Carr today makes his home in Berlin, a town in upstate New York. Image from https://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Writer-Caleb-Carr-keeps-TV-s-Alienest-at-arms-12513563.php. |
The Alienist endures quite
well despite me. A major best-seller when published, it was turned into a TNT
miniseries last year; Carr wrote a sequel in 1997 and has announced another coming
later this year. A look at its Amazon.com page reveals many satisfied customers.
One
of the blurbs on the back jacket of my paperback describes The Alienist as likely to please fans of Silence Of The Lambs and Ragtime.
Having read both those books, I certainly see the influence.
My
main problem is with the story: It’s rather rote. It’s a thriller featuring a
psychiatrist, so you expect something reductive, but not like this. Characters
don’t speak English as much as they do exposition:
“I suppose you
couldn’t expect much more, from a child born out of anger and unwanted by both
his parents. To my mother he was the symbol of my father’s savagery and lust,
and to my father – to my father, much as he wanted more children, [he] was
always a symbol of his degradation, of that terrible night when desire made an
animal of him.”
Other
times, they reflect on the heavy irony of their situation:
I could not keep
my mind from wandering, as Kreizler spoke, to thoughts of what had occurred on
Bedloe’s Island that night. Beneath Bartholdi’s great statue – which symbolized
freedom to so many but was now, in my mind, an ironic emblem of our killer’s slavery
to a murderous obsession – another boy had met a terrible and undeserved end.
Carr
also throws in clunky, portentous harbingers of troubles to come:
During those
months she saw a great deal – most, indeed, of what the Lower East Side could
throw at a person. None of it, however, was any worse than what we were bound
for that day.
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| Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning), John Moore (Luke Evans), and Laszlo Kriezler (Daniel Brühl) prepare to examine a killer's handiwork in a scene from the 2018 TNT miniseries adaptation of The Alienist. Image from https://observer.com/2017/11/the-alienist-trailer-tnt-netflix-mindhunter/. |
There’s
a spunky, streetwise boy; a mute serving woman devoted to Kreizler; a strong
black carriage driver who plays piano and sings lieder; and two Jewish
detectives whose occasional comic squabbling reminded me, not negatively, of Tintin’s Thomson and Thompson.
Another
woman, Sara Howard, works for the New York Police Department and dreams of
becoming its first female officer.
Told
by Moore she is only a secretary, she replies: “Yes, John – but I’m in the
building, aren’t I? Ten years ago that would have been impossible.”
Moments
like that are too much on the nose, yes, but the interplay between the
characters and their varied relationships with the enigmatic Kreizler kept me caring
about them, at least a little.
The
atmospherics are well-done, too. Carr knows his metropolitan locale, bringing
you back to a time when white-helmeted sanitation workers yelled at litterbugs.
One moment you follow Kreizler and Moore into the Metropolitan Opera House (“I
squeezed and pushed through the vestibule, trying to coax movement out of grand
dames whose clothing and proportions were suited only to stationary pursuits”),
the next you are venturing along Mulberry Bend, part of the dangerous, long-gone
Five Points neighborhood where murder was commonplace and you were safer if you
didn’t carry a badge:
Death and despair
did their work without fanfare in the Bend, and they did a lot of it; just
walking down those lonely, decrepit streets was enough to make the sunniest of
souls wonder about the ultimate value of human life.
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| Mulberry Bend, as it was in 1896, the year of The Alienist. Today it is Manhattan's Chinatown. The photograph is credited to famed urban reformer Jacob Riis, who makes a cameo appearance in the novel. Image from https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-mulberry-bend-new-york-new-york. |
A
visit to a squalid apartment there, decorated by eyeballs in jars, is a
ghoulish highlight. There is much gore in The
Alienist [“You’re still going to insist that he’s sane, that he wants us to
catch him? He’s eating his victims,
for God’s sake!”], but far more of the narrative is concerned with people discoursing
at length on what it all means from both a psychiatric and social point of
view.
One
recurring theme is the notion of the serial killer as emblematic of a sick
society, something that might feel more convincing if it were less pressed.
There are times Carr seems to be providing his own Cliff Notes. He even pauses
to explain what the word piton means.
The
real problem with The Alienist lies
not with the history but the mystery. There’s nothing much to it, really. I’m
trying to avoid spoilers but there is little effort on Carr’s part to keep a
reader guessing; once his narrative lights upon a suspect you don’t have to
wonder about Christie-esque misdirection ploys. The main suspense comes from crossing
up the heroes in their attempts at stopping the killer.
Contrivances
come early and often. At one point, Moore finds himself in a dangerous bar
where he asks too many questions and gets drugged. Just as he seems about to be
raped for his troubles, he is rescued by one of his associates, who we are told
had a feeling something was wrong.
“It’s
a miracle that he happened to follow you, Moore,” Kreizler marvels.
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| A trolley on Manhattan's 42nd Street, as it was around the time of The Alienist. Image from http://stuffnobodycaresabout.com/2016/02/05/old-new-york-in-photos-59/. |
A
few pages later, Kreizler explains his strategy for dealing with the rest of
the police department, which other than Roosevelt is hostile to his methods:
Underestimate them at every turn. “We must rely on the Police Department’s lack
of imagination,” he says. Of course this works.
At
the climax, Kreizler relies on that classic Bond-movie trope of allowing
himself to get captured so the villain will spill the beans. Other suspense
stories conclude with someone being shot unexpectedly; here two such
shots in the dark occur, back-to-back.
Carr
spends chapters detailing Manhattan locales that not only do not figure in the
story’s outcome but never appear again. There are walk-on cameos from various
famous people like tycoon J. P. Morgan and moral crusader Anthony Comstock;
Roosevelt’s famous brood also appears in one scene so Carr can take stock of
their various personalities. Carr’s enthusiasm for the time and place is
palpable; it just isn’t contagious.
Historical
fiction has many practitioners, and one high master: Alexandre Dumas, whose energy and wit made it look easy. Carr at times reminded me of John Jakes, quite
an effective historical-fiction writer in my view, if a bit heavy-handed in
trotting out a famous dead person. Carr showed me just how subtle Jakes is by
comparison; after a while I felt less like a reader here than a visitor at
Madame Tussauds.
Carr
knows his onions; his attention to detail and the argot of the period won me
over enough in places to wish I could overlook the clunky plot. The premise has
promise; the result just doesn’t flow well for me.
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