T A B L E+T A L K

"Confess now," says Salon reader Milton Rosenberg. "Mortification of the literary ego may well prove redemptive." From Proust to Pynchon, share your shame over the great books you've never read in Table Talk.

R E C E N T L Y

Arundhati Roy
By Reena Jana
(09/30/97)

Gary Oldman
By Richard Covington
(07/09/97)

Peter Greenaway
By Christopher Hawthorne (06/06/97)

Tom Clancy
By John Donnelly
(06/04/97)

Robert Hughes
By Gary Kamiya
(05/23/97)

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INTERVIEW ARCHIVE

R E V I E W S

The Tetherballs of Bougainville
By Mark Leyner
A scorching satire about American culture, this "novel" details the bizarre adventures of a seventh-grader named "Mark Leyner."
(10/06/97)

S A L O N
R E C O M M E N D S

A list of staff favorites, updated weekly

Caleb Carr discusses serial killers, murderous moms and growing up terrorized by the Beats.

BY DWIGHT GARNER | "i was a pretty angry kid," says Caleb Carr, the bestselling author of "The Alienist." It's a steamy afternoon in late August, and we're sitting in Carr's tiny apartment, a fourth-floor walk-up in New York's East Village. More office than living space, the apartment is a jumbled assortment of maps, military histories, antiquated photographs. The 41-year-old Carr, who's wearing black Converse high-tops along with chinos, a white dress shirt and dark vest, clears off a chair so a visitor can plunk himself down.

We're talking about how, when Carr was a kid growing up in Manhattan, he vented his anger into the study of military tactics. It's a slightly unusual interest for any kid. But in Carr's family, it bordered on the bizarre. ("It reduced my mother to tears, literally," he says, "because she equated it with killing.") Keep in mind, however, that Caleb Carr didn't grow up in your typical American family.

Carr's father, Lucien Carr, was a seminal figure in the early years of the Beats. While he wasn't a writer himself, he introduced Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs to each other, and he remained friends with all three until their deaths. Lucien Carr was a kind of dark star in the Beat firmament. In 1944, he murdered a man named David Kammerer, who was so infatuated with Carr that he followed him to New York from their hometown of St. Louis. The details of that night are unclear (Kammerer may have tried to kiss Carr). But Carr later rolled the dead man into the Hudson River and, with Kerouac's help, hid the man's eyeglasses and the murder weapon. Kerouac was imprisoned for several days as an accomplice; Carr was out after two years, having convinced the court that he was fighting off an unwanted homosexual advance.

Carr's parents divorced when he was young, and he's never been particularly close to his father. In many ways his life and career can be viewed as a repudiation of the Beats. His two novels -- "The Alienist" (1994) and now its sequel, "The Angel of Darkness" -- are steeped in New York history. Long on plot and short on runaway emotion and intuition, they couldn't be less like the work of Kerouac, Ginsberg or Burroughs.

In "The Angel of Darkness" he brings back the cast of "The Alienist," including the eminent psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, to solve a new case, one that involves a woman who may or may not be murdering her children. Carr spoke with Salon about the new book, as well as his complicated feelings about such matters as his childhood, Hollywood and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. He speaks loudly -- his voice carries just a hint of a barroom New Yawk accent -- and his intonations fill the room.

Some writers are able to compartmentalize their writing lives -- they work in the morning, and they pretty much manage to forget about it during the rest of the day. That doesn't seem to be the case for you.

It's true. I have no other life when I'm working on a book.

Do you consciously decide to immerse yourself this way? Or does it just happen?

I haven't always done things this way. It's the nature of the two books. They have been so consuming that I end up living inside them. But a certain amount of it is also the pressure of delivery, especially this last one. I was working on a TV project in L.A. for a long time and it got delayed and delayed and delayed. By the time I got back I really needed to get to work.

In the introduction to "Angel of Darkness" you describe the "disturbing physical and mental journeys" that this book took you on. What did you mean by that?

As disturbing as the last book was, the subject matter of this book is something that people really don't want to look at. People are disturbed enough by serial killers, but the whole notion of female violence, particularly maternal violence -- the idea of mothers who kill -- really unnerves people. I think you can see that in the way it's reported in the press. Serial killers get the play of athletes, but when mothers kill children, especially their own children, the story appears one day, it's gone, you never see it again. Susan Smith is probably the exception because she was so good at manipulating the press.