A cautionary tale for the Afrostocracy

Crisis Forum

The Emperor of Ocean Park

By Stephen L. Carter

(Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95)

Art is art and pulp is pulp and never the twain shall meet. Or so I'm told. These days there's a virtual Berlin Wall in American fiction separating "genre" work from loftier "literary" undertakings. Here, we keep our populists sequestered in the Oval Office, not in the libraries, where they might actually cause some trouble. Take a crossover tale like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. The word from the literary conspiracy theorists was that selection as an Oprah's Book Club pick would've been a virtual kiss of death for Franzen's Pulitzer aspirations. His public excommunication from the Oprah club cleared the way for The Corrections to be selected as a National Book Award Winner. And let's not even talk about why literary populists Stephen King and Walter Mosley will always be dissed in favor of the indecipherables on the Modern Library must--reads list.

Such has been the state of affairs, but Stephen L. Carter's sublime, sprawling (you can almost say epic) tale The Emperor of Ocean Park alters the script.

Carter is a Yale University law professor best known to the reading public for his weighty meditations on the nature of civility, the affirmative action debate and the role of religion in American democracy. One is tempted to say that Carter has turned over a new leaf with this, his debut novel, until you consider that The Emperor of Ocean Park is the tale of an uncivil Black Ivy League law professor who is grappling with a spiritual crisis after his father's mysterious death.

The book, like its lead character, wears its ambition like an Armani suit. And, truth told, there is an unmarked mass grave for ambitious freshman novelists. With Carter coming to the table with a wandering 657-page opus, one suspects that the gravediggers had shovels at the ready. Read the first 50 pages of this novel, however, and it becomes clear that any burial would be premature. With Emperor, Carter has blended an improbable cocktail of genre and literary fiction and gotten away with it big time. His accomplishment is ironic because the novel itself is a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of unbridled ambition.

Jaded, overweight and profoundly insecure, Talcott Garland is the antithesis of the standard issue noire pro tagonist who sweats Freon and talks in Italics. This is probably the case because The Emperor of Ocean Park is far from your standard issue tale of deception and intrigue. Calling this novel "crime fiction" is a little like calling Thurgood Marshall a lawyer or Joe Louis a boxer: It is one of those rare works that exists within a category at the same time as it transcends it. The novel is a mysteryand simultaneously an exploration of the exigencies of Black middle class life, a tale of mid-life crisis and a deftly spun chess allegory. With The Emperor of Ocean Park, Carter has attempted a complex somersault and managed to stick the landing.

Set amongst the lettered Afrostocracy of Martha's Vineyard, a fictional enclave called Elm Harbor and Washington's "Gold Coast," the plot revolves around the death (murder? suicide?) of judicial giant and borderline demagogue Oliver Garland, Talcott's father. The judge's sudden demise (allegedly the result of a heart attack) brings together the three surviving Garland children: Addison, the militant dilettante, Mariah, a conspiracy-minded ex-journalist and mother of six, and Talcott (Tal for short), a brilliant and unhappily married legal scholar who is cultivating his midlife misanthropic streak. The fourth child, Abby, was killed as a teen by a hit-and-run driver.

The force of Oliver Garland's personality, it soon becomes clear, has warped his children's lives into a type of quiet (and acceptably bourgeois) disfunctionality. Addison is a serial polygamist who ricochets from city to city to maintain distance from his kin; Marian is given to neurotic flights of fancy, combative defense of her father's questionable reputation and random acts of antagonism toward her younger brother. Talcott is brilliant, antisocial and jealous of both his siblings.

The judge, we learn, was a firebrand conservative intellectual who was nominated for the Supreme Court during the Reagan era. His confirmation hearings were, to cop a phrase from Clarence Thomas, a "high-tech lynching," in which his lifelong friendship with the infinitely shady ex-CIA operative Jack Zeigler becomes his Achilles Heel. Publicly humiliated and quickly ditched by the president, Garland resigns his position on the federal bench and becomes a marginal, Robert Bork-like figure in American legal life.

Circumstance quickly turns the judge's funeral from an occasion for the rare familial truce into an interconnected series of perils that threaten to destroy Talcott's marriage and career, and possibly lead to a premature reunion with his late father. The appearance of a decrepit (and nonetheless powerful) Zeigler at the funeral and a cryptically delivered threat conspire to make the circumstances of the judge's death an afterthought - the real jeopardy lies in the circumstances of his life.

Zeigler, an Amazonian enigma named Maxine and a number of other nefarious players, we learn, are after the judge's final "arrangements." Their shared belief that these "arrangements" were revealed to his youngest son leaves Talcott in the center of a bloody competition for access to this information. The problem of course is that Talcott has absolutely no idea what these so-called arrangements might be. Were this the only element of Carter's story, it would be difficult to hold his readers for almost 700 pages (conventional wisdom has it that past page 300, people stop caring whether or not the butler did it). But it just so happens that Kimmer Garland, Tal's lawyer wife is being considered for a federal judgeship - an opportunity that is likely to evaporate if the skeletons from the family closet begin rattling around again. Certain that a second confirmation debacle will spell the demise of his marriage to a woman who, despite their difficulties, he genuinely loves, Tal is caught between the figurative devil and the deep blue sea.

Add into the equation his borderline obsessive paranoia about his wife's infidelity and the Byzantine academic politics of his law school (one of his colleagues is his wife's chief competition) and you have a complex of shifting alliances and truths half told that grips from opening paragraph to concluding sentence.

Much to Carter's credit, he has crafted a novel in which the principal characters are both three-dimensional and compelling. This book is of a rare species: the character-driven thriller. The moral line between villain and hero is deliciously hazy, and in true legalistic fashion is always open to interpretation.

The Emperor of Ocean Park is a magisterial undertaking, superbly executed. The undertow of Carter's prose takes hold early on and carries the reader through a labyrinth of family secrets, political conspiracy and the epic trials of marriage and family. It's often been said that good fiction, like a well-made suit, shows none of its seams. If that adage holds true, Stephen Carter has stitched together an offering worthy of Brooks Brothers.

William Jelani Cobb is a visiting professor at Spelman College and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader (Palgrave Press).

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Jul/Aug 2002
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