The Angel of Darkness
Deignan, by Caleb Can Thomas
FIGHTING IRISH The Angel of Darkness Caleb CanThomas Deignan Partisans of historical fiction, having recently slogged their way through Don DeLillo's brutal, brilliant rendering of the cold...
...FIGHTING IRISH The Angel of Darkness Caleb CanThomas Deignan Partisans of historical fiction, having recently slogged their way through Don DeLillo's brutal, brilliant rendering of the cold war, and Thomas Pynchon's version of colonial Williams-burg, may want to give the postmodern sections of their brains a breather with The Angel of Darkness, Caleb Carr's follow-up to his wildly popular 1993 bestseller, The Alienist...
...Darrow emerges as a harbinger of Johnnie Cochran justice, in which the "victims and witnesses are put on trial instead of the defendants...
...Stevie Taggart's own tangled past helps lead the group to Elspeth Hunter-known to the denizens of the Lower East Side's cocaine dens as Libby Hatch...
...Indeed, Carr reassembles the entire cast of characters from The Alienist-the ruffian narrator Stevie Taggart, the spirited Susan Howard, the brainy Isaacson brothers, Times scribe John Schuyler Moore, and the brooding, enigmatic alienist Laszlo Kreizler-to solve a baby kidnapping...
...She's not just breaking the law," Susan explains regrettably, "she's defying the order of things...
...From Susan Smith, who drowned her children, to the au fair trial, women who kill children continue to fascinate and confound...
...The chase leads them into Manhattan's loathsome nether world, circa 1897, and the darkest corners of the human mind...
...But overall, neither political profundity nor moral ambiguity is Carr's purpose-his good guys and gals are good...
...Hollywood should be so selective...
...Kreizler, an educated immigrant...
...Cyrus, an African-American...
...A mother with endless charm, shifting identities, and an "animal" stare, Libby's "natural" proclivity to nurture seems to be conflicting with (or complementing) a murderous impulse...
...and even El Nino, an oddly-named noble savage...
...a long shot that pans out for the prosecution...
...The street gang that the sleuths fight is made up of ugly "violent Irishmen," and even Cyrus's parents were killed by an Irish mob during the New York City Draft Riots, an event which firmly established the anti-Irish sentiment prevalent among progressive nineteenth-century New Yorkers...
...None of which means all that much when it comes to Carr's ability to recreate a time and stage a morbid murder mystery...
...At last report, a film version of The Alienist was stalled out in Hollywood, which is a shame...
...Still, there is a tradition of elitist disdain for Tammany Hall and its supporters (not to mention their children and grandchildren) that is steeped in religious, ethnic, and class suspicions, which-if history is his game-Carr should be more wary of...
...Like any good historical novelist-given the setting, Jack Finney's Time and Again comes to mind- Carr sees the seeds and shadows of present conflicts in the past...
...The only thing more foolish than suggesting that Carr is some sort of bigot would be to gloss over Tammany's many crimes and misdemeanors...
...Carr, here, is playing with material that could quickly turn polemical, reactionary, or both...
...In fact, Kreizler and his crew represent a cross section of New York City pro-gressivism...
...This time around, Susan, now an independent investigator (and still an impassioned feminist), calls on the gang to help solve the disappearance of a Spanish official's daughter...
...the Isaacson brothers, intellectual Jews...
...Cornelius Vanderbilt and Elizabeth Cady Stanton also make appearances, but none receives the treatment of Teddy Roosevelt, who buzzed energetically through The Alienist and whose reformist (and preachy, and hokey) zeal returns in The Angel of Darkness...
...But the charm of The Angel of Darkness- aside from Carr's reconstruction of upper- and lower-crust Manhattan-is its page-turning allure, an element too often sacrificed in more cerebral fare...
...Like any big book, The Angel of Darkness could have used some pruning...
...New York, it seems, would be a noble place if it weren't for that damned "Irish clan of Tammany hirelings...
...He does have more to say, though, about Clarence Darrow, who defends Libby in a trial filled with courtroom antics, tension, and (phew...
...Can's heroes are Moore, your basic blue-blood...
...No surprise, then, that aside from gruesome criminals, this crew's nemeses also include fattened Tammany sachems and cops on the take...
...Taggart, the Five Points-escapee...
...And with tensions high, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, it's anybody's guess where the true motivation for this crime lies...
...Caleb Carr has mastered the craft of creating engrossing stories with horse-clopping, gaslight-era ambiance, foot-racing suspense, evil-bad-guy chills, and even a bit of historical contemplation...
...the bad are bad...
...Neither this book, nor The Alienist, is merely guilty pleasure...
...Susan, an independent-minded woman...
...But this (like the occasional contrivance and melodrama) doesn't detract from the book's merits...
Vol. 124 • December 1997 • No. 22
