Crime as a Vehicle for Culture
ERASE, BRIGITTE
Crime as a Vehicle for Culture The Emperor of Ocean Park By Stephen L. Carter Knopf. 657 pp. $26.95. Reviewed by Brigitte Frase Critic at large, "Ruminator Review"; contributor, New York...
...Garland's downfall resulted from the revelation that he had secretly met with Jack Ziegler late at night, in chambers...
...In the classic solution, it is always the black side that is checkmated...
...Tal's relatives and friends, even his wife, sense that he is sizing them up and finding them wanting...
...Ziegler was under investigation for murder and for brokering deadly deals worldwide...
...She is sexy, occasionally tender, but mostly impatient with her husband's quest and his desperate inwardness...
...It begins with newspaper clippings about Tal's sister Abby, killed decades ago by a hit-and-run driver who was never found...
...Talcott brushes her off, yet becomes alarmed when his father's disreputable old friend, Jack Ziegler, approaches him at the cemetery and demands to know about "the arrangements" the Judge made...
...Maybe we'll find out in the next book...
...This is the kind of conundrum mathematicians like to pose to one another as a challenge...
...The writing is intelligent and the dialogue is well-tuned, but sometimes you can feel the author reaching self-consciously for literary effects...
...It is also the clue to "the arrangements...
...nor is he doctrinaire about whether religious faith must or must not play a role in the nation's political life...
...No wonder everyone thinks him at best a loner, at worst a nut case...
...Another sexy black woman, named Maxine, trails Talcott, accosts him and maybe even shoots at him...
...Talcott may be overly sensitive and wary, yet at the same time he is coping with real prejudices and assumptions concerning conventional roles for blacks...
...His family, his in-laws and their circle have money and clout...
...Still, The Emperor of Ocean Parkis an impressive book...
...Talcott is baffled, and also disturbed by Ziegler's assurances that Tal's family will be protected...
...In the wake of the debacle, the Judge left the bench and went out on the lecture circuit to earn money and vent his spleen...
...Furthermore, Talcott can be impossibly dense, so it is not entirely credible when he notices a significant detail that sets him on a new track...
...Always one of two or three blacks in his group of colleagues, he keeps his radar up...
...Talcott attempts to sort out what his duties are to those around him...
...The scrapbook had been put together when the Judge, half mad with grief, sequestered himself in his study and began drinking heavily...
...He literally sees a red aura when someone toys with him or says something that sounds racist or dismissive...
...Many other rich themes are also woven into the narrative, like the rationality of the chess game versus the heart's gamble on faith...
...Those "arrangements," Talcott comes to realize, are some sort of document his father wanted him alone to find...
...But he hates their materialism, competition and complex rules for social ranking...
...The Judge, however, was working on a strategy to make black win, and he was counting on living pawns to prove him right...
...sacrifice arguing with self-serving ambition...
...That willingness to think actively on the page, rather than presentpreconceived conclusions, stands Carter in good stead in his ambitious firstnovel...
...She will not say if she is from the FBI, CIA, or some other interested party: "We're kinda like the good guys...
...One is the crime story...
...Tactless, he refuses to play academic or corporate politics...
...Talcott is being followed, not only in Washington but in his college town of Elm Harbor...
...He is visited by two men who falsely claim to be FBI agents...
...Every time tension builds and we turn the page eager to find out what happens next, we are waylaid by an essay on sociology or legal ethics, or an involved childhood flashback...
...But another catastrophe embittered him for good...
...I mean, not the great guys, we're not saints or anything like that, but we're better than some people....' Talcott, too, wants to be a good guy, neither prig nor prick —no sermonizing, grandstanding or hustling...
...The Judge did not so much enjoy playing chess as he did setting and solving such puzzles...
...Talcott wrestles with his father's demons and with the recognition that he himself is, in many ways, as guarded and judgmental astheelder Garland...
...A delicious subplot features academic star Marc Hadley, whose sole book is every constitutional law professor's bible—until it is revealed that he plagiarized the famous Chapter Three...
...But he has this lethal family swamp to drain and it tries his patience...
...Tal's growing obsession with the search puts his marriage and career, as well as his sanity, on the line...
...Carter has produced the big novel, throwing in everything he knows and wants to say...
...It stops around the time he mysteriously emerged sober and became the vigorous and admired Appeals Court Judge he was before...
...Everything he disdains about white corporate culture feels doubly insulting when blacks mimic it...
...Kimmer is a career woman on the fast track, a leading candidate for an Appeals Court seat...
...The demands of the crime plot puzzle, though, are frequently too much for Carter...
...Subsequent pages are filled with articles about other hit-and-run deaths over a period of several years...
...Strange things soon begin to happen...
...Unfortunately, some remain: Did the Judge commit suicide, or not...
...At a faculty dinner where Hadley is trying to charm everyone with his offthe-cuff brilliance, he comes a cropper in a conversation about Martin Buber...
...But his editor might have tried harder...
...His pacing, in particular, is irritating...
...The package reappears on the seat of his car...
...He is utterly devoted to his son and loves his wife, though she causes him misery...
...He comes from a privileged background...
...the third and most poignant recounts the alienation of a black law professor who appears to have it all, according to the values of both the black and white middle class...
...A white and a black pawn each advance five times, then "promote" into higherranking pieces...
...The enigmatic missive is based on a chess problem called the Excelsior...
...It's true...
...He is forced into a painful and unwanted intimacy with a father who was remote and rigidly moralistic, but whose mind Tal must now penetrate if he is to free himself of his inherited burden...
...Carter draws her character well, with nuances and complications, but makes it clear she is primarily interested in herself...
...Professor Talcott (Tal) Garland goes to Washington, D.C., to attend his father's funeral...
...Morris Young, who turns out to have a Harvard doctorate...
...and the entanglements of love and hate, judgment and forgiveness...
...Early on, he comes upon a scrapbook in the Judge's library...
...At one point he has Talcott say that it's hard to shut up a law professor...
...He won't let you hug him, but you will want to shake his hand...
...Although The Emperor of Ocean Park gets off to a very slow start, and suffers from too many digressions, the patient reader will not regret having persevered...
...Talcott, while never exactly likable, is an honorable, prickly, conflicted man, who acquires a sad wisdom...
...A white pawn from the Judge's chess set is delivered by an unknown courier...
...A crime thriller does not usually run to 657 pages, but actually there are three novels here that sometimes mesh and sometimes jostle for pre-eminence...
...Carter is sharp and funny on the backbiting and politicking that goes on in universities...
...A pair of thugs then assault him and seize an old envelope he is carrying that contains a chess book...
...TALCOTT finally locates the letter his father left behind, in case something were to happen to him...
...The author needs to have his protagonist make such perceptions, of course, to solve the case and fill in the gaps...
...He is not "for" or "against" affirmative action, for example...
...another is an academic farce set in a prestigious Connecticut law school...
...He ruminates a lot about fundamental issues like loyalty, duty, faith, honor...
...He is bested by a Baptist minister he had taken no heed of, Dr...
...he is a fine semiotician, reading words and gestures not simply for what they ostensibly mean, but for what they disguise...
...He is quick to anger and suffers neither fools nor smooth operators...
...Months later, a black pawn arrives on Tal's doorstep...
...contributor, New York "Times,' Los Angeles "Times" In his books of social analysis and critique, such as Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby and The Culture of Disbelief Stephen L. Carter, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, displays a subtle intelligence that tolerates ambiguities in argument and discourse...
...His sister Mariah and her husband are prime players in the showy-wealth game...
...From whom, and why...
...Who is Maxine...
...His morality, turned hard and vindictive, soon made him the black darling of conservatives...
...Judge Oliver Garland died at his desk, presumably of a heart attack, but Tal's sister Mariah, a conspiracy fan, is sure he was murdered...
...Carter smuggles genuine theological discussion into this scene that is lovely and wise...
...apparently the thieves were looking for something else...
...Nominated to the Supreme Court, he self-destructed during the televised confirmaticn hearings...
...Talcott is not an agreeable man...
...Dreading what he might discover, he nevertheless feels compelled to hunt...
...Carter likely had Clarence Thomas' truculent arrogance in mind here, but the circumstances and outcome are different...
...He suspects she has affairs...
...The freedom to write without a net of footnotes seems to have made him giddy, and he indulges himself...
Vol. 85 • May 2002 • No. 3
