'Surrender' to the pleasures of Caleb Carr's novel

Probably the most famous biographical sketch in literature appears in “A Study in Scarlet,” when Dr. John Watson tries to describe to his own satisfaction the character of his inscrutable new roommate, Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes’s knowledge of literature, philosophy and astronomy is “nil,” Watson reports, his political knowledge “feeble,” his botanical knowledge “variable” (strong on “poisons generally,” at least). His acquaintance with chemistry is “profound” and with true crime stories “immense.” He’s an expert singlestick player. He plays the violin.

This catalog kept popping into my mind as I read Caleb Carr’s new novel Surrender, New York  (Random House, 592 pp., *** out of four stars). That’s first because every word of fiction Carr has produced seems to have been written in either direct or indirect conversation with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even those that take place in contemporary times, like this one. (Carr's best novel, The Alienist, set in 1890s New York, reads like a proposed American analog to the Holmes stories.) And second, because Surrender, New York is as wildly and bafflingly volatile in its qualities as the specimen Watson sets out to describe.

So what would the book’s own biography look like?

1. Main character: strong. Surrender, New York is told from the perspective of a psychologist named Dr. Trajan Jones. He’s got a limp, a penetrating grasp of criminal behavior, an obsessive loathing of CSI, and a cheetah. His nickname is “Sorcerer of Death.” Good stuff.
2. Story: mixed. Jones is tracking the murders of a series of “throwaway children,” a premise that allows Carr to deploy his indisputable gift for the gothic and the macabre, and the pursuit is suspenseful and believable, broadly speaking. On the other hand, some scenes — particularly a police shooting — are bizarrely confused and implausible.
3. Secondary characters: abominable. Jones’s sidekick is Michael Li, whose sole role sometimes seems to be “good-natured recipient of racist jokes.” Jones's high school-age apprentice is so breathtakingly unrealistic that I sincerely wonder if Carr has ever encountered a teenager in the wild. These are the two best secondary characters.

4. Historical and geographical context: superb. Carr has always had a fantastic feel for the anecdotal randomness of history, and it’s a joy to watch him bring upstate New York to life here — its regional egos, its Civil War myths.
5. Weaponry, military trivia: pervasive. Carr is either the delight or the bore of his local gun club, I imagine. He’s holding a sword in his author photo.
6. Style: spectacularly inconsistent. Drawing from his own deep wells of knowledge or speaking in the voice of his proxy, Dr. Jones, Carr is nuanced and engaging; any time he ranges outside his ken, he commits solecisms of characterization and dialogue for which a high school student would be rightly pilloried.

An unusual profile, then! Watson throws his list into the fire in vexed perplexity. Should we do the same with this book? I don’t think so. Its good parts justify its bad parts, and its bad parts are awful enough that they’re never boring. Not uninteresting lodgings, if you can handle a little unpredictability.

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Charles Finch is author of the Charles Lenox mystery series.