Caleb Carrs Surrender, New York echoes The Alienist in theme if not setting
Caleb Carr's long, sometimes interesting but seriously flawed new novel, "Surrender, New York," recalls his 1994 bestseller "The Alienist." In both novels a determined psychologist, aided by colorful friends and opposed by police and politicians, pursues a serial killer who targets young people. The novels differ, however, in time and location: "The Alienist" takes place in New York City in 1896 while this novel is set today in Upstate New York.
In “Surrender, New York,” Carr’s criminal psychologist Dr. Trajan Jones, along with his wisecracking partner, Dr. Mike Li, examines the deaths of four teenagers. Jones and Li previously worked for the New York Police Department but were forced out after bitter conflicts with their superiors. These conflicts arise from their — and the author’s — strong belief that today’s criminal investigations rely too heavily on forensic tools such as fingerprints, DNA and drug testing to win convictions rather than obtain justice (not always the same thing). Thus, they’re now living on a farm owned by Jones’s great-aunt near the town of Surrender, where their truth-seeking again earns them political hostility and threats to their lives.
Carr also dramatizes the emerging issue of “throwaway children” — children who are homeless because their parents have either thrown out or deserted them. Jones and Li investigate the case for four such teenagers who went to Manhattan and then returned home to meet mysterious deaths. Whether they were kidnapped by sexual predators or taken in by wealthy families wanting to help them is unclear. Jones and Li suspect that powerful political figures want the deaths hushed up lest the issue embarrass New York’s governor, who is running for reelection as a champion of the young. The idea that senior political figures would cover up murders to avoid a minor controversy may strike some readers as a bit far-fetched.
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Early in their investigation the two men meet Lucas, a boy of 15 who lives with his sister, Ambyr, who is 20, beautiful and blind. They invite Lucas, who knew the dead children, to join their investigation. Soon, Ambyr and Jones, who’s twice her age, begin a romance and we see that, for all his intellectual heft, the celebrated criminologist is clueless in matters of the heart.
Jones is nothing if not colorful. As a youth, he lost his left leg to cancer and he moves with difficulty, on a prosthetic limb, aided by a cane that contains a “razor-sharp, two-and-a-half-foot rapier.” Despite the harm cancer has done him, he defiantly puffs away on cigarettes. He and Li, who teach an online course on criminal investigations, have their office inside the fuselage of a pre-World War II Junkers aircraft that Jones’s ancestor brought from Germany in the 1930s. And Jones lavishes on Marcianna, his beloved pet cheetah, the love that other men might reserve for a child.
Carr’s writing can arouse both admiration and disappointment. His descriptive passages can be elegant and informative but they go on endlessly, maddeningly; details can strengthen a novel but an avalanche of them can kill momentum. Carr’s plot is complex, sometimes bewildering, and the reader can become lost amid his epic digressions, no matter how well they read.
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He’s often determined to shock the reader. One scene ends when corrupt police fire 46 bullets into an unarmed man. That’s bad enough, but before the shooting Carr gratuitously shows us the decomposing body of a baby who’s been shoved into a toilet. We didn’t need that.
Nor do we need all the dirty talk. Jones, Li and the teenager Lucas curse constantly. After a while I started circling our old friends the f-word and the s-word. Whenever the dialogue heats up, and these three bicker often, those words typically graced the page four or five times and soon my count reached well into the hundreds. All this becomes profoundly tiresome. Carr, a man of considerable erudition, surely knows better. At one point the lovesick Jones recites a fine couplet from Euripides. (“Stronger than lover’s love is lover’s hate. Incurable, in each, the wounds they make ...” Would that Carr had given us more Euripides and fewer obscenities.
All in all, despite some interesting characters and thoughts on social issues, “Surrender, New York” became for this reader an agonizing ordeal. In my experience, as novels near or exceed the 600-page mark they should be regarded with caution. Some are wonderful (“Lonesome Dove,” say, or “An Instance of the Fingerpost”) but others suggest a writer who’s pursing a dream when he should be consulting an editor. Serious cutting, amounting to at least 100 pages, might have made this a far better book.
Patrick Andersonregularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post.
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Surrender, New York
By Caleb Carr
Random House. 592 pp. $30
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