In his best-selling novel ''The Alienist,'' Carr sent his pioneering child psychologist, Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, on the hunt for a serial killer over the rooftops and into the underworld of turn-of-the-century Manhattan. Kreizler's second case, set exactly 100 years ago, explores another species of moral turpitude through a Victorian lens. The quarry this time is more alluring and, if it's possible, nastier: a woman of beauty and intelligence who murders children and lots of them -- both her own and others whom she's kidnapped in a strange perversion of the maternal instinct: Serial Mom in a bonnet and crinoline.
Whether such a creature is credible matters less, certainly to Carr, than the familiar ethical conundrum posed by the hunted murderess: is she mad, and in need of sympathetic incarceration and treatment; is she bad, and thus a reasonable candidate for summary execution; or is she neither of the above, but a creation of her social context, requiring understanding?
Kreizler is an exponent of the last view, as he can still declare, even after the woman has dispatched the equivalent of an entire kindergarten as well as some half-dozen adults. ''It's our job,'' he remarks, ''to understand the perceptions that lead to such misbegotten actions, so that we may have some hope of keeping others from being enslaved by them.'' As evidenced by the book's resolution, Carr is more ambivalent about extenuating circumstances in cases of multiple infanticide, or about the salutary lessons to be learned from them.
Comments
Post a Comment