Alaska Employment Law

The Emperor of Ocean Park

Reviewed by Will Schendel

The title character of Stephen Carter’s first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, Oliver Garland, is a black conservative on the D. C. Court of Appeals.  Nominated to the Supreme Court, his confirmation hearings have all of the controversy but none of the eventual success of Clarence Thomas’.  Garland refuses to repudiate a shady friend, withdrawns his nomination, resigns from the appeals court, and goes on the “rightpac” lecture circuit.  When he dies in the early years of Bush ‘43, he leaves a cryptic note for his younger son, Talcott, a professor at an elite law school.  Talcott’s attempt to decipher the note leads him to uncover his father’s past, at a risk to his marriage and his academic career.

The author, Stephen Carter, is himself a black conservative law professor (Yale), best known for his 1991 book, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, and more recently for his defense of his traditional Christian beliefs.  After 25 years teaching law, Carter turned to fiction, first this book, and this summer the sequel, New England White (see following review).  Carter’s silky smooth prose seems effortless.

New England White

Reviewed by Dean Hanley

Stephen Carter’s second novel, New England White, has been climbing up the best seller lists.  Carter’s strength lies in writing about the contemporary African-American upper class.  At the center of New England White (the title seems to refer as much to the relentless snowfalls that take place in the story, as to what the protagonist refers to as the “paler nation”) is Lemaster Carlyle, a minor figure in The Emperor of Ocean Park.   Carlyle is now the university president in Elm Harbor, a fictional place in a state that is in New England but is decidedly not Massachusetts.  His wife Julia is a deputy dean at the divinity school.  As Lemaster refers to it, they are members of the “darker nation” living in the “heart of whiteness.” 

Lemaster, whose college roommates included the man who is now the President of the United States, is nothing if not a pragmatist.  Early in the tale, we learn that his daughter Vanessa is receiving psychiatric treatment after she drove her father’s Mercedes onto the town green and set it afire.  It turns out that Vanessa’s considerable problems are somehow related to the subsequent murder of Kellen Zant, an internationally renowned economics professor at the university and, years before she met Lemaster, Julia’s lover.  When the police and the university seem to stonewall the investigation as just another robbery, Julia learns that Zant was trying to sell some information before he died, information about a white girl named Gina who figures prominently in Vanessa’s fantasy life and was herself murdered (by a young black man) in Elm Harbor decades earlier.  As with Zant’s murder, the investigation into Gina’s murder was, she learns, similarly railroaded.  The plot is a page turner of the first magnitude, and Carter’s commentary on the state of black-white relations in Elm Harbor is rich and detailed.  I couldn’t stop reading.

Dean Hanley practices corporate law with Foley Hoag in Boston, Massachusetts.