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AND now for something completely different: A Cultural History of Causality (Princeton University Press, 拢18.95/$29.95). This could be titled 鈥淎 history of motivation鈥� 鈥� in the sense of an actor asking 鈥渨hat is my motivation for this?鈥� Stephen Kern, professor of history at Ohio State University, investigates this query through treatments of murderers in Victorian and modern fictions, set against the changing scientific and psychological understandings that informed these.

We get thumbnail sketches of novels and of the history of statistics and of serotonin鈥檚 role as a neurotransmitter. Kern pays surprisingly little attention to syphilis, to schizophrenia or to Satan 鈥� to name two mainstays of the Victorian and modern fiction that I鈥檝e read, and one fiction that is massively regaining political influence in some places. But then he鈥檚 read and regurgitated far too much already.

Dealing with Friedrich Nietzsche, Kern is a Nietzschian. Summarising Sigmund Freud, he is a Freudian; and I remember too vividly giving up on understanding psychoanalytic thought and filing Freud鈥檚 work under 鈥淐ocaine, effects of鈥�.

So what did Victorian murderers express in their violent acts? The causes were first explained, says Kern, as the outcome of 鈥渂ad blood鈥�, then later came 鈥渄egenerates鈥� reverting to a beast or savage lurking within the civilised breast. By 1939 in John Steinbeck鈥檚 The Grapes of Wrath it is the 鈥渋nvisible hand鈥� of Adam Smith鈥檚 analysis of markets that is the murderer, and no individual can be found to acknowledge a motivation. And in Thomas Pynchon鈥檚 1973 Gravity鈥檚 Rainbow 鈥� we鈥檒l probably never know what鈥檚 going down.

Kern waits to the end to reveal his own motivation: he hunted high and low for the effects of quantum mechanics on popular culture, and failed to find sources. The resultant hotchpotch is intriguing, but skirts the problems that fictions are by definition not true and that it鈥檚 hard to distinguish honest expressions of cultural values from what you might call stage machinery.