The Alienist - Caleb Carr [262]
And if what I had to say about the past was objectionable, my feelings about the present, the future, and such things as the possibility of a cataclysmic attack on the United States by obscure people and organizations around the world were worrisome enough that it was often hard to get even close associates to publish them.
Such being the case, I began to think about writing fiction, affecting to tell anyone who was interested that my mind could no longer be constrained by mere facts. I had published a novel (what stunk) right after college, and I knew at least that it’s smart policy, if you’re a writer or would-be writer looking for a subject, to try to imagine a book that you yourself would like to read but can’t find. A lifelong interest in crime and the formation of the mind had led me to decide on a psychological thriller, but my grounding in nonfiction would not allow me to be anything but rigorous in my research and approach. This, I soon realized, could get tricky: How do you devise a story that includes the kind of hard science I’d nosed around in without making readers and audiences want to drive ice picks through their own eyes?
I’m not sure just when the idea of focusing on two men—both from abusive backgrounds, one of whom becomes a murderer, the other a hunter of such murderers—came to me. Perhaps it had always been there; perhaps it had been my original method of reconciling the furiously different sides of what had once been my bright but violently angry young self. Whatever the case, the most pressing need was to know why people of such seemingly similar backgrounds could turn out so differently. This was (and remains) the point at which, for my money, most psychological thrillers went wrong: They’re not really psychological investigations at all, but conventionally crafted whodunits, what I call narrative crossword puzzles.
From the first, I was, like most authors, interested in creating something different: in my case, a “whydunit,” a story that could raise hackles even and especially if you knew who the killer was from early on. What I wanted to do was illustrate critical personal moments in a life (or lives) that steadily build and reinforce character and thus become the building blocks of action, rather than trying to spin another variation on the old Aristotelian dynamic of action leading to character. (For if we have learned anything from modern movies, surely it is that action is not necessarily character.) As I conducted my search for illustrative formative events, it occurred to me that I might also echo those same elements of personality and experience in my two main characters’ surroundings.
Being a student of Henry Adams, that grandson and great grandson of presidents who was a prodigious early force in developing a rigorous, scholarly brand of American history, I had long since accepted his central notion that nations, like people, have characters, and that determining those collective identities and behaviors is the most difficult yet most important job of the historian. As I began to look for turning points in the histories of my two main characters, it occurred to me that I might set the tale not in the present but at that point in American history when psychology first evolved far enough from its parent discipline, philosophy, to stand on its own and address dynamic (that is, conscious and voluntary) patterns of human behavior, in