“The Dante Club” has received generous early reviews, as well as considerable advertising support from its publisher, so it has a decent shot at becoming a best seller along the lines of “The Alienist,” assuming we all ignore the fact that, for all its earnestness and scholarly smarts, it’s just incredibly silly. Pearl graduated from Harvard in 1997 and from Yale Law School in 2000, finding time to win a prize for his Dante research somewhere along the way. With “The Dante Club” he’s attempted to write a 19th-century novel, but his roots are showing. The book is plotted like any number of serial-killer movies–David Fincher’s “Seven,” say, in which each murder is a tableau mirroring not Dante but one of the deadly sins, or the old Vincent Price flick “Theatre of Blood,” in which an actor kills critics in grand Shakespearean style.
Early in the novel, a prominent judge is found dead in a section that I skimmed over because of the high incidence of the word “maggot.” Then the clergyman is set on fire. “It’s Dante!” Holmes exclaims. “Someone has used Dante to kill Talbot!” At the time, virtually no one in America has read “The Inferno,” but Longfellow and friends are at work on a translation. They fear that the police will consider them the prime suspects–and that Dante’s name will be tainted–so they set about secretly cracking the case. They skulk around in underground tunnels. They get into carriage chases. They outsmart Harvard’s evil Dr. Manning, who just totally hates Dante. They even brandish weapons and spout make-my-day dialogue, as when the poet James Russell Lowell points a rifle at somebody with a pistol: " ‘Try me, and whatever happens, you shall lose, wretch. Either you shall send us to Heaven,’ he added as he cocked his gun, ‘or we shall send you to Hell’."
If you pretend that “The Dante Club” was actually meant to be camp–a kind of parody of historical thrillers and their faux-period prose–it becomes weirdly entertaining. But even if you don’t, Pearl’s unabashed love for Dante’s work is ultimately touching. My guess is that his heart isn’t really in all the serial-killer nastiness on display here–that he simply wanted to write a novel about the poet and made a pragmatic commercial decision. “The Dante Club,” however, doesn’t take you to hell and back. It just leaves you stuck in purgatory.
