Originally posted on my blog.

Let's get something out of the way: The Rule of Four by Justin Thomason and Ian Caldwell is pretty much a paint-by-numbers affair as far as intellectual thrillers are concerned. There is, of course, an extremely obscure historical text called the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili that apparently has an arcane code within it, revealing an earth-shaking truth that may rewrite history. There is an obsessive soul, a senior in Princeton named Paul, who becomes so consumed by the mystery that he pushes away the people who love him in his pursuit of it. There is a narrator named Tom who has already watched is his father be consumed by the Hypnerotomachia until his death and is now watching helplessly as the same thing happens to his best friend.

There are also deaths, because people who write their thesis on 15th Century Italian manuscripts live life on the edge.

But for some reason, reading this book pushed so many pleasure centers in my brain in ways that made me forgive the banal writing and even the weird tonal shifts that it takes. When the story is not straining to be suspenseful or shocking, I actually found it kind of comforting. The hermetic setting of the Princeton campus may also have contributed to that, because it evoked associations of Dead Poets' Society, The Gilmore Girls, and other pop culture things about idyllic schools and youth.

Also woven into the narrative is the theme of father-son relationships. Within the rarefied confines of academia, both Tom and Paul are ultimately seeking validation from father figures that seem to only convey their affection as it is related to history. I'm all about tender masculine relationships so those parts were really up my alley.

The authorial decision to structure the novel as a thriller, I think, ultimately hurt the story. Had Caldwell and Thomason emphasized the coming-of-age and nerdy mystery aspects while softening the mortal peril, it could have been a more satisfying read. It's in books like these that you can really detect the bald commerce of the book publishing industry. The Rule of Four clearly earned a lot of money my attaching its name onto Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (published one year before) but it also suffered when it comes to cultural esteem because of it. If it had been edited and marketed as, say, Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, it could have attracted the kind of readers who are interested in atmosphere and academic scholarship, rather than readers looking for zippy thrillers with Vatican conspiracies.

I guess I like the idea of it more than its reality, which happens often enough. The Rule of Four has acute things to say about the futility and nobility of scholarship which really hit home for me and my own college experience. During those short years, you are put into this very unnatural environment where a missed term paper feels like the end of your life. It's a time when all the learning opportunities are there for the taking and you have all the time in the world to pursue all that you want to know. But of course, youth is wasted on the young.

A couple of pages before finishing The Alienist, I declared that it is the most complete mystery I have ever read. Months after finishing this book, I still don't think that was hyperbole. Using the milieu of New York City in the middle of the Gilded Age, historian-turned-novelist Caleb Carr pits the emerging phenomenon of the serial killer against the pioneers of what would become criminal profiling in this fascinating example of a historical thriller.

At the center of the story is Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, an engimatic alienist--early word for psychiatrist--who is attempting to solve a series of gruesome murders targeting boy prostitutes in 1896 New York. He faces challenges from all sides: notorious proponents of morality are unwilling to accept the existence of boy prostitutes (or any form of homosexual trade) in the first place, and policemen of the time are violently opposed to any form of scientific inquiry into the criminal mind. With the help of a young, reform-minded Theodore Roosevelt, Kreizler creates a small team of intelligent and determined proto-profilers who gather material and pyschological evidence in order to create the portrait of an urban predator.

Moneyed journalist John Schuyler Moore is the narrator for the entire novel, chronicling his inclusion to the team as well as his long-standing history with Kreizler and Roosevelt. They are joined by Sarah Hamilton, a secretary in the New York police department who has her eyes on a more prominent role in law enforcement, as well as the Isaacson brothers, talented Jewish detectives who feel marginalized and underused in their current positions.

I require a lot before I'm able to completely buy into an extended 1st person POV, especially when it comes to historical fiction. The diction and inner life of the narrator must be just right, or else I start to disbelieve or distrust what they're saying--a dealbreaker for me. The Alienist, however, is pitch perfect in terms of the rhythms required from a profiling-focused mystery. Though not strictly "intellectual" in the way, say, a Perez-Reverte mystery is, there is still enough meat here to engage the mind even as Kreizler and team deal with copious amounts of legwork throughout their investigation.

Much like the early seasons of Criminal Minds may seem ponderous compared to other types of police procedurals, the tension here isn't on the action, but in the steady accumulation and discovery of the serial killer's history, pathology and motivations. The final confrontation is almost an afterthought, in fact, and I did feel that the scenes by end with their attempts to understand the killer become overlong and unnecessary.

Things this novel made me do:

- Look up "Knickerbocker" on Wikipedia, resulting to lost hours reading about New York as a former Dutch colony.
- Use Google Maps to search for the crime scenes mentioned.
- Re-indulge my years-old Anderson Cooper-triggered fascination with the Vanderbilt clan.
- Trawl the internet for photos of young Theodore Roosevelt. Attractivess: affirmative.

So yeah. Thoroughly satifsying, an exemplary specimen of the mystery genre. Carr wrote a sequel to this, though conversations with a friend who has read it made me very leery of reading it. I just don't want my good opinion of this book tarnished. Is that weird? Anyway, I feel that I'll be coming back to this book when I need some comfort reading.

Read on my blog.

With all the requisite caveats about the gender politics in your standard noir stereotypes, I enjoyed the atmosphere and the setting. The characters not so much, but that's par for the course in most noir.

"The trouble with dames is, dames is trouble," to quote my favorite podcast Beyond Belief, from the episode where they had a gumshoe named Pterodactyl Jones and his sidekick, a ghost pterodactyl.

Seriously though, I really think this novel is no great shakes??? I mean, I'm predisposed to liking noir, and Dashiell Hammett is one of my favorite writers of all time. But Chandler--who is the other pillar of the hardboiled detective genre--doesn't appeal to me at all, which is weird because a lot of the successful contemporary pastiches of hardboiled fiction are clearly more Chandleresque than Hammettesque. Walter Mosley's novel Devil In A Blue Dress, for example, hews more closely to this storystelling style and I liked it a lot.There's just something about the first-person writing that seems insincere and performatively cynical here. The noir tropes that I like are mixed in with the tropes I detest and the mixture just comes out as underwhelming for me.