DATE: Sunday, November 23, 1997             TAG: 9711130668

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA

                                            LENGTH:   89 lines

CARR STALKS ``EVIL'' LURKING WITHIN WOMEN

THE ANGEL OF DARKNESS

CALEB CARR

Random House. 629 pp. $25.95.

Caleb Carr's The Alienist (1994), about a band of convention-defying sleuths tracking a serial killer in New York City in the 1890s, swept me up in a rush of enthusiasm to find out who and why. So reluctant was I to set this wondrous detective thriller aside that I didn't, unless sleep compelled me to.

Not surprisingly, I reached for The Angel of Darkness with great expectations - perhaps unfair to impose on any sequel. But impose, I did. And disappointed I was.

Until about halfway through . . .

Caleb Carr is a meticulous and inquisitive writer who combines his far-reaching interests in history and developmental psychology with fictional and real-life characters, such as the bully Theodore Roosevelt. His addictive formula couples a quest for knowledge with continuous plot intrigue.

When Carr speaks through his ``alienist'' (psychiatrist), Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, about a person's life ``context'' - childhood happenings, especially traumatic ones - being the blueprint for his adult behavior, it is hard not to be drawn in. Too many people today haven't figured out the child-adult connection, and Carr approaches the subject from a perspective of 100 years ago!

Nonetheless, it was page 300 before Angel, an exploration of violence committed by women - especially mothers against children - caused me to lose sleep. Until then, the novel, burdened with situational details, moved slowly.

But not consistently so. The arrival of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton to posit that women, by ``divine'' law, are nurturing, and can only be corrupted by men's society, enlivened things. As did the doctor's response to such folderol.

In part, familiarity hinders the story. So does point of view.

The remarkable characters Carr introduced in The Alienist return in Angel, and though they still seem remarkable for their progressive, logical thinking and their bravado, they are now familiar. Much of the fun of The Alienist involved their coming-together. Angel unites them a year later, and of necessity, must refresh their past.

The visionary Dr. Kreizler still clashes with old friend John Moore, a blustering, hot-headed New York Times crime reporter. Indomitable Sara Howard, now running a ``research'' agency for women, still conceals a derringer in her skirts. The brilliant detective brothers, Marcus and Lucius Isaacson, still bicker over their ground-breaking forensic tests (ballistics, fingerprinting); and the quiet, but forceful Cyrus Montrose still keeps order at Kreizler's home.

But none of these characters narrates Carr's tale of ``evil'' in a mother's form. Instead, Stevie Taggert, a 13-year-old saved from the streets by Kreizler, and a minor player in The Alienist, does the honors.

The novel opens in 1919, when Stevie is 35, and unfolds as a retrospective. This technique prevents the young Stevie's lack of life experience from intruding, but it can't compensate for his lack of presence. Until Stevie becomes a key figure - which requires much exposition - he gets in the way.

The structure is also problematic. Stevie recalls a 22-year-old case: that of child kidnapper and murderer Libby Hatch. Though he initially only hints at details of the Hatch case, which begins with the woman's abduction of a Spanish diplomat's 18-month-old daughter, Stevie reveals her fate, thus taking some of the zing out of the pursuit.

Eventually, Carr does build to an exciting pursuit sequence, as well as a fabulous courtroom sequence, in which none other than Clarence Darrow engineers the defense. (His negative and reverse logic is meant to foreshadow ``reasonable doubt'' ploys of modern trials.) But patience is required.

True to form, Carr superbly re-creates turn-of-the-century New York, this time, among the gangs on the waterfront. But his chief concern is the shattering of societal myths based on ignorant, yet harmful sex stereotypes.

Explains Sara to Stevie: ``It isn't really possible for men to understand how much the world doesn't want women to be complete people. The most important thing a woman can be in our society . . . is identifiable. Even when Libby's evil - perhaps most of all when she's evil - she's easy to categorize. . . . Imagine how much harder it would be to say, yes, she's a woman capable of terrible anger and violence, but she's also someone who's tried desperately to be a nurturer, to be a good and constructive human being.''

That motherhood is not a biological mandate and that women do violence with some frequency is not news to me. But it is still provocative and amusing to read Carr's various arguments on the female ``nature,'' such as it was (mis)understood in Libby's time, and, by implication, still is today. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma, an attorney, is an editorial columnist and book

editor for The Virginian-Pilot. ILLUSTRATION: Photo

CALEB CARR

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