Stephen L. Carter may be best known as the man who reportedly sold his debut novel for a million-dollar advance. But the 52-year-old American legal scholar should be equally famous for publishing the most airtight acknowledgements in U.S. literature.
“The Emperor of Ocean Park,” his 2002 thriller about an African-American judge tarnished by confirmation hearings, ends with a 13-paragraph section that revolves around h ow not to read the novel. The book was “not a roman-à-clef on Yale University,” where Carter teaches, or the “tribulations of middle-class African-American America.” It was not even intended to chronicle real-life Washington, D.C., where Carter grew up.
At the offices of his New York publisher, Carter appears to be fighting another lawyerly battle with the forces of literalism. His new novel, “New England White,” has just earned two trenchant, mostly positive reviews in The New Yorker and the online journal Slate, the latter commenting on Carter’s “painfully cynical perspective on American race relations.”
Carter serves up a disclaimer about ideas in general as they appear in his fiction. “The opinions expressed by my characters are not necessarily my opinions,” he says with a grin. “But I try to create characters who are complete enough, so that they have ideas that – whether you agree with them or not – sound natural.”
Carter tends to speak this way, in long sentences that fold in on themselves. He is tall, wide-eyed, and looks 15 years younger than his author photo depicts him. There is nothing spontaneous or improvised about his delivery.
“New England White” turns on the issue of racial discrimination. Like its predecessor, the novel tells of a powerful black family living in a mostly white community outside a prestigious New England university. Here Carter brings forward the Carlyles, who appeared in the previous novel, to have their near-perfect tableau shattered.
As the book opens, university president Lemaster Carlyle and his wife, Julia, come upon the body of professor Kellen Zant while driving home. The hot-shot economist and former fling of Julia’s has two bullets in the back of his head. Two forces fight to keep the investigation alive when it is squashed from on high. They are an African-American security chief who struggles with the university bureaucracy, and Julia, so chased by rumors she decides the only way to stop the whispering is to find the killer.
Distinguished family
Carter, he would like it to be clear, did not grow up in the upper-class world where the book unfolds. But he is not too distant a cousin. His grandmother, Eunice Hunton Carter, was the first black woman to be a district attorney in the state of New York. His father, Lisle C. Carter Jr, was deputy director of the office of economic opportunity in the Kennedy-Johnson administration, and president of the University of Washington, D.C. Carter grew up in Washington, Harlem, and Ithaca, N.Y., where his father taught public administration at Cornell.
When his family moved during high school, he stayed behind, boarding with a Jewish family, an experience that changed his attitude about faith. He attended Stanford and Yale and clerked for the legendary Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
From Marshall, Carter says he learned to “not let ideology or politics” hem him in. Thus his 1991 literary debut, “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby,” came in the form of a memoir that criticized the social policy which, he says, was designed to be integral to his achievement.
Carter went on to write more than a half dozen other books of nonfiction, on subjects as diverse as the Supreme Court confirmation process and civility in American life. He has been labeled a liberal, a neo-conservative, an evangelical and everything in between.
As a novelist, Carter has slightly more leeway to go beyond ideas, to describe the experience of being black in America today. “It’s striking that even now,” Carter says, “the degree to which if you take a very successful African-American corporate lawyer, investment banker, or corporate executive, and you take him alone among other black people of similar attainment, how quickly the conversation so often turns to the slights one has suffered, or the things one can’t talk about in certain other atmospheres. And I’ve tried to illuminate that a little bit in each of these novels – without slowing down the story.”
His own man
In “New England White,” Carter’s main protagonist, Julia, may be stopped from entering public beaches, but she simply doesn’t have the time to sweat these racial daggers.
“She can’t stop being a mother in order to chase down this mystery,” Carter explains. “She has to continue to do all these things.”
Carter first entered the public eye in a big way 13 years ago when his “The Culture of Disbelief,” about how American law and politics trivialized religion, became President Clinton’s favorite book. When not teaching at Yale, he has taught values-based leadership classes at the Aspen Institute. He has also run a Boy Scout troop.
Growing up in Washington and Harlem, dreaming of being a writer, Carter says he was just as influenced by Dickens as by African-American writers. But he is careful not to pigeonhole himself.
As admiring as he is of writers of the Harlem Renaissance, he differs on a fundamental level. “Take someone like Langston Hughes,” Carter says. Hughes was trying in his work to “interpret for a larger audience not merely Harlem, but an idea, an ideology, a way of thinking – not simply here are some things that some black people do, but here is the way that black people think.”
Without being so naive as to disavow the persistence of discrimination, Carter has endeavored to be his own man, and refused to “think black.” He merely wants to think, and now to tell a good story. As for the ongoing struggle of integration, Carter says that’s for America to decide: “All I can say is this: There are a lot of reasons for the tension, doubtless there are faults on both sides … I am not trying to solve it. I’m just trying to show that it exists.”
Carter pauses to consider an appropriate ending, finding it quickly. “And perhaps by being aware that it exists, people will be more likely to ameliorate it.”
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.
FICTION
New England White
By Stephen L. Carter
$26.95
