discussed this novel two days in a row in January 2003, and recommended it for a variety of reasons, but since that was before I had invented the categorized rating system, there aren't any numbers to be seen. I've not read the novel since, and my opinion of it is somewhat lessened by its mediocre sequel, but I'll try to recreate a scoring for it now, even though it's 1.5 years later as I write this, in July 2004.

It was a very good book with a lot of humor and great turn of the century NYC details.  The overall plot wasn't that great though, it lagged a bit towards the end, and had a somewhat anti-climatic finale, so the potentially very high scores declined a bit. I've also reviewed Angel of Darkness, Carr's sequel to The Alienist.

Read on for my two days of blog book discussion.

I just started reading The Alienist this afternoon, and it seems pretty promising.  It's a novel by Caleb Carr that's basically a historical serial killer detective story.  Sort of the Buffalo Bill part of Silence of the Lambs, set in the 1896.  Check out the Amazon.com page on it; the reader reviews are very enthusiastic.  Not that I'd seen that before I checked the book out from the library, mind you.

I was in the library to get the last Wheel of Time novel, Winter's Heart.  I got it, and while looking in the Sci-Fi section (which is where they have the fantasy novels at the La Mesa library) The Alienist popped out to my eye.  I remembered hearing about it years ago when it was a surprise best seller, and that it was a serial killer detective thing, so I grabbed it.  I found it odd that it was in the Sci-Fi section; I'd have thought horror or suspense, but I'm not sure they even have those in this library branch.  Clive Barker is just in the regular alphabetical A-Z fiction, for example.  In any case, putting The Alienist in Sci-Fi seems profoundly misplaced.

That aside, it's looking like a pretty good novel.  The book opens with the narrating character describing Theodore Roosevelt's funereal, and then goes into a flashback about an event 25 years earlier that Teddy was involved in.  The solving of a horrible murder mystery in turn of the century New York City.

As the flashback begins, you learn that the narrator is a reporter for the NYTimes, and a friend of newly-appointed police commissioner Roosevelt, and there is a horrendous murder/mutilation discovered. The Alienist of the title is a psychiatrist, a pioneer of the profession, from back in the days when mental illness was just coming to be understood.  People don't think anyone wacky is demon possessed at the time of the story, but they don't know a whole lot more than that.

Anyway, I'm not going to give a full summary of the tale, especially since I read it for less than half an hour earlier, and am only up to page 51/496.  It's just that my introduction here went a bit long.

I immediately dislike two of the major aspects of the novel.

For one, I hate starting off in a flashback.  That destroys almost all of the suspense for me, since what's the point in reading if you know all the principles survive (physically and otherwise) the events of the novel?  It's like watching a football game that you know the final score of in advance.

Secondly, I don't see the point in using a real person, Theodore Roosevelt, as one of the main characters.  It's sort of a clever thing, and references a real occupation of the man at one point in his life, when he was a NYC police commissioner.  But it seems weird the whole time with him being a historical figure, and the reader knowing he goes on to become a famous president of the United States.  Why not just invent a purely fictional character?  Possibly him being Teddy Roosevelt will become important later on in the novel, or the novel's events will somehow shape him in later life/his presidency, but at this point it seems a pointless attention-getting detail.  Like the author had a good idea for a novel, the setting, the events, the characters planned out, and then realized that Teddy Roosevelt was around at the same time as the novel, and that instead of just having some cop sorta like Roosevelt, they could actually have it be Roosevelt, in a weird historical fiction brainstorm.  Probably it was planned all along, but it feels like an unnecessary element.

That aside, the writing is brilliant.

Well, "brilliant" is probably too strong a word, but Caleb can put down some goddamned nice prose.  Lots of very well-arranged sentences, conveying involved concepts and scenes, and doing so very well with perfect wording.  One example from page five that immediately got my attention.

There's no simple way to describe it.  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.

That is nicely done.  Clive Barker's writing gives me that same sort of stop and nod in appreciation on a regular basis, but very few other authors, of the type of novels I like to read, ever do.  Certainly no turn of phrase in all the 7000 pages of the 10 Wheel of Time novels ever grabbed me so.

Here's another one I liked, from page eleven:

I was about to ask him what he was doing there at such an hour but swallowed the query when we charged headlong through the still-busy intersection of Broadway and Houston Street.  Here, it was once sagely remarked, you could fire a shotgun in any direction without hitting an honest man; Stevie contented himself with sending drunkards, faro dealers, morphine and cocaine addicts, prostitutes, their sailor marks, and simple vagrants flying for the safety of the sidewalk.  From that sanctuary most of them called curses after us.

Lots of writers can spin a good yarn. Invent interesting characters and events, and perhaps even an entire imaginary world to set the tale in. The best of them apply themselves and churn out best sellers. (Note that there are plenty of successful writers who aren't especially good at it.  Just lucky, or able to create a world or characters that are good enough to compel readers, but unable to really do it all at once. Like movies, most books suck.  Even/especially the most popular ones.)

Other writers can write very well, arranging words cleverly to tell a tale, or more often describe news events.  Lots of these types write biographies or other non fiction, or else work in the media, for magazines or other periodicals.  They tend to not be as famous or rich, but they're better writers.  They just don't have the imagination for fiction, or the ability to keep a coherent thread going for 400 or 500 pages.  Plus it's a lot easier to be witty and concise and brilliant for 800 words than it is for 120,000.

Very seldom do the two meet.  Few are the interesting novelists who can write well enough that a reader (me for instance) will stop mid-paragraph and think how well turned a phrase just was.  And usually when a brilliant non fiction writer tries to do a real story, something longer than a short story, they crash and burn. It's always a "great American novel" type of story, where there's no real plot or action, just a bunch of philosophical musings and societal observations and such.  Some people enjoy it, but it's not the sort of great story that most fiction readers are after. 

It's way too soon for me to say if Caleb Carr is one of the rare ones, based on 51 pages of one of his novels, but he's made a pretty good start.  He's definitely good with the words; whether the novel will hold up is the question.

Speaking from experience, it's really hard to keep both going well.  If you have good plot ideas, you want to write faster and keep going and get the story out, and not worry about every little word being perfect and clever.  And if you're not doing well with the plot, you tend to go over and over existing parts and reword so much that you strip the life out of them.  Finding the correct balance is difficult.  Obviously, since everyone is trying to find it, but so few novels succeed in both ways.

Generally reading something well-written motivates me to go write myself. I'll read some more before I go to sleep and see if it works with The Alienist.  Though I'll be too tired to write at that point.  Perhaps it will influence my dreams to be better-written than usual.  Lot of good that will do me.

January 22, 2003

I wasn't planning on discussing The Alienist again today, but since I spent several hours finishing it up this evening, it's in my head, and in theory that time was when I might have been doing other things that would have given me ideas to write about in this space today.

My discussion of it yesterday was mostly in theoretical terms, pondering how few writers were both excellent at word arrangement, and story-telling.  Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist, adds a third tricky dimension to things, by imparting historical information on every page.  There are hundreds of short historical essays throughout the book.

Not really "essays", but every time someone moves through NY or Washington, there is some mention of the surroundings, buildings, society, etc.  Very often you get mentions of when a building was first constructed, what it was initially used for, and interesting behind the scenes information.  The 1890 census, for instance, or the early years of the Natural History museum, or construction of famous NY hotels, or the Metropolitan Opera, etc.

So he's working in lots of history and background detail, while keeping the story moving along in involving fashion, and frequently writing it brilliantly.  There is also a lot of really funny stuff.

A section around page 200 has the narrator meeting the other characters who are part of the serial killer investigation at a restaurant/bar.  I'll quote a bit from it, though I do hate touch typing.

When streetcars had first made their appearance on Broadway, some unknown conductor had gotten it into his head that if the snake-like bends that the tracks made around Union Square weren't taken at full speed the car would lose its cable.  The other conductors on the line had bought into this never-proven theory, and before long the stretch of Broadway along the park had been dubbed "Dead Man's Curve," because of the frequency with which unsuspecting pedestrians and carriage riders lost life or limb to the hurtling streetcars.  Brubacher's Terrace provided a commanding view of all this action and through warm afternoons and evenings it was customary, when one of the engines of injury was heard of seen approaching, for bets to be laid among the wine garden's customers as to the likelihood of an accident occurring. These bets could, on occasion, be sizable, and the guilt that the winners felt when a collision did take place never managed to drive the game out of existence.  Indeed, the frequency of accidents, and thus the volume of gaming, had risen to such proportions that Brubacher's had earned the sobriquet, "Monument House," and was now a required stop for any visitor to New York who aspired to the title of gamesman.

As I crossed Fourteenth Street to the small curbed island east of Union Square that was home to Henry K. Brown's splendid equestrian statue of George Washington, I began to hear the usual shouts--"Twenty bucks the old lady doesn't make it!"; "The guy's only got one leg, he doesn't have a prayer!"

By the time Kreizler and Lucius Isaacson showed up, at just past seven, my friends and I had witnessed two near-misses on nannies with perambulators and one brush of a street car against a very expensive landau.  An intensive debate as to whether this latter contact constituted a collision ensued, one that I was just as glad to get away from by retreating to a relatively remote corner of the terrace with Lucius and Kreizler, who ordered a bottle of Didesheimer.  The debate that I found them engaged in, however, steeped as it was in references to brain parts and functions, proved more more entertaining.  The distant sound of an approaching streetcar at last signaled a new round of betting, and I had just wagered the full contents of my billfold on the agility of a fruit peddler when I looked up to find myself face-to-face with Marcus and Sara.

I was just going to suggest that they get in on the action, as the fruit peddler's pushcart was particularly heavy-laden and the encounter looked to be an exciting even-money affair; but when I paused long enough to study their respective faces and attitudes--Marcus's wild-eyed and agitated, Sara's pallid and stunned--I realized that something extraordinary had occurred, and put my money away.

I cracked up at that, for how it's written and how matter-of-factly presented.  The book is full of this sort of detail, details about the unbelievable anarchy that was daily life in NYC in the late 1890's.  Vice, prostitution, legalized cocaine and heroin, bribes to the police at every turn enabling whorehouses to offer every sort of women, girls, and even very young boys (who are the primary murder targets of the serial killer in the novel). There is very little law and order, and no justice for the lower classes.  No housing laws or regulations, hardly any sewer systems, so large portions of the city are lawless slums where you might have to fight your way to your door each night.  Bodies lying in the streets, bars and whorehouses operating all hours of the day and night, etc.

We tend to think that was never the case in modern countries, and sniff at similar situations of anarchy and whoring in less-developed countries.  It's all horrible and unimaginable that there are 10 and 12 year old boys and girls available for a few dollars in much of Southeast Asia, but do we think that was also the case in much of the United States just 100 years ago?

Anyway, after three pages in the book, where the main characters are all involved in intense discussion of a horrifying note the killer sent to the mother of one his victims, just as you've forgotten about the ridiculous streetcar wagering going on, this comes in, as a shout heard across the bar.

"Jesus Christ, I never seen a fat man move like that in my life!"

I was reading this part in the tub earlier, and this set me to laughing out loud for at least a solid minute. The absurdity of the entire situation, with street cars flying down some winding hill at top speed, showing total disregard for anything or anyone who might get in their way, and continuing on unchanged if they did happen to flatten someone, is just amazing to behold.  That's how the world was until recent years, and it still is in a lot of countries. Things in modern nations are so overly civilized now, with so many laws and lawsuits and safety precautions that the crazy anarchy of things 100 years ago is hard to imagine. 

I'm assuming that most of the historical details in The Alienist are based in truth, since the author does have a degree in history.  Perhaps the things he discusses aren't exactly as they were at the time and place, but I assume most of it is pretty much true, if somewhat enhanced in the telling.

So there is a lot of good humor in the book, as well as historically fascinating information and horror and police procedural discussion.  But having finished it, I must report that the actual story doesn't hold up as well as it starts out.

It's a complete novel, and has a climax and conclusion and resolution, but I didn't think there was much tension going into the final show down scene, despite the several plot twists and turns right at the end. I think that was largely due to it being all told in a flashback, where we know for a fact that almost all of the main characters get out alive, and we suspect that the ones we aren't sure about will as well.

Stories told in flashback are a popular technique, especially for ones set in the past (Or written in the past; Lovecraft does it in almost every one of his stories) but I find it a poor choice of technique in almost every circumstance.  Simply because it ruins much of the suspense in an action tale, since you know that the narrator will survive.  And often that others will also, if the pre-flashback intro mentions them in later years as well. This always bothers me.

The plot wasn't that strong either, since it seemed there was too much of an effort to fit later events to match earlier ones.  Basically the people in the story are the first ever to do profiling, which is to look at a case, figure elements and aspects of the killer's personality from it, and then try to find someone like that.  It's what every serial killer movie/book does now, and has become an accepted part of law enforcement.  In the book it's presented as something very new and radical, (like most everything else that we now take for granted) and much opposed.  As it turns out, virtually every single supposition about the killer, every projected trait and biographical detail, every habit and aspect of physical appearance... all match up 100%.  The first serious suspect they have is soon found to be without question the killer, and then it's just a matter of catching him, which proves a lot more problematic than anticipated, and leads to the relatively-unsatisfying conclusion.

But the main thing that I didn't think worked so well was how conveniently and neatly the investigation proceeded.  I would have preferred a few loose ends or unexpected aspects of the killer.  But there were none, and every prediction about him came true.  It was almost as if the story was written to make the profilers seem too perfect.  Which of course it was, since it's a fictional tale, not a documentary.  But it just felt too perfect, to me.

That and the ending was unsatisfying.  It didn't leave ends dangling, which is a good thing. However it was the opposite; wrapping up every single thing, crunching every single character into one unlikely location one after the other, in a veritable parade of unbelievable coincidences and convenient final resolutions.

All of which might have been acceptable if it had been exciting, or less predictable, or at least less "happily ever after".

So I definitely recommend the book, it's got a lot of really good aspects. Unfortunately the ending isn't one of them, though the overall package is well worth the read.  Plus you'll learn history of the sort you didn't get in school. There is a sequel entitled Angel of Darkness. An amazingly unoriginal title, but the reviews seem to be solid, so I'll have to see if they've got that one at the library. Hopefully it won't dominate the blog for two straight days.

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