Equation for Evil: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Crude, One-Sided, A Real Disappointment
Review: As a young Marine I, like countless others in the Corps, read Caputo's memoir A RUMOR OF WAR and was deeply impressed by his courage under fire and his complete honesty as a reporter. Years later, I picked up EQUATION FOR EVIL hoping it would be equally compelling.

What a disappointment! This story of a serial killer is slow and predictable, but what really makes the book a chore to read is the crude, heavy-handed nature of Caputo's moralization on the nature of evil. With no sense of irony and no sense of history, Caputo repeats over and over that evil is a "choice" and that modern man has lost his moral "compass" through to much excess, permissiveness, and mass-media sex and violence. These thoughts come from his protagonist, Heartwood, a man trained by Catholic Jesuit priests who is no longer a practicing Catholic but who retains a deep and unquestioning loyalty to his mentors, the elite Jesuits.

The murder of a handful of Asian children on a bus is supposed to be decisive proof that modern man has somehow lost his way. But when medieval Europe was firmly under the control of the Catholic church Jewish children were murdered in much larger numbers over a period of centuries! The crimes of the Catholic church throughout the centuries are far more horrendous than any of the media sex and violence Heartwood deplores in this novel. Moreover, his authoritarian nonsense about religion providing a "compass" falls apart in the face of the real corruption and evil that has always existed within the church hierarchy.

It is worth noting that there is not one single Jewish character in this novel, not one person who could challenge Caputo's ignorance about the history of his own church. Caputo ignores the Crusades, the Inquisition, the religious violence of the Reformation, and three centuries of the African slave trade -- all horrific crimes against humanity committed with the express written consent of the Catholic church. He actually has the effrontery to suggest that modern crimes prove man cannot survive without "guidance" like that provided by the vicious, murderous, destructive Catholic church of the medieval world. The only real villains in this novel are scientists, intellectuals, and Jews -- in that order. Caputo reserves special venom for Sigmund Freud, who was both a scientist and a Jew, and whose teachings on sex undermine the repressive policies of the Catholic church. But at least Sigmund Freud never burned any Catholics at the stake.

The hypocisy of this book is evident on every page. On a visit to Los Angeles in search of a teen runaway, the smug Heartwood refers to Hollywood as "the Vatican of illusions." Does the Vatican stand for truth? The truth that Jews are the killers of Christ? That blacks are inferior? That Protestants burn in hell? That the sun moves around the earth? In what exact way is the Vatican superior to Hollywood?

This book is an offense against tolerance and truth.

Rating:
Summary: A Rewarding Read
Review: This one certainly doesn't deserve to be out of print. Loosely based on the story of Stockton, CA mass murderer Patrick Purdy, Equation for Evil is an excellent read. Caputo must have done some reading in neuroscience before writing the novel, but I got the feeling that he couldn't quite figure out where to go with the book's central theme -- whether the roots of evil are spiritual, biological, or both. Much is made of this issue in the first half of the novel, but it sort of fades out towards the end as the book takes on the shape of a conventional thriller. One of the book's major characters, psychiatrist Leander Heartwood, rather unconvincingly sheds his belief that the roots of violent behavior are in the brain and decides that evil is "a choice." Perhaps so, but the choice to open fire on a group of schoolchildren is not one that most of us would remotely contemplate, leaving the question of what makes people like Purdy tick hanging.

Having done some reading and writing about neuroscience issues myself, I can empathize with Caputo's confusion, but research conducted in the years since this book was published has drawn even stronger connections between neurological abnormalities and violent behavior. I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the implications of all this and remain somewhat baffled. Seems like Mr. Caputo had a similar reaction.