Difficult to Understand Why Stephen L. Carter\'s

¶ … difficult to understand why Stephen L. Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park has generated so much controversy since it was published at the beginning of the summer. That level of interest in his work stems from his taking on a position that is both unusual and provocative as Carter, through his protagonist, explores contemporary American political and academic life - and the nature of race, class, and power in the United States today.

The novel tells the story (which resembles the works of Grisham in his conspiracy/thriller model) of a chain of events that begin with the death of a conservative African-American lawyer named Oliver Garland. Although a good provider for his family and in many ways a decent person, Oliver is also emotionally demanding and withdrawn from his family. He is far more interested in using the personal power and personal connections (and wealth) that he already has to acquire more personal power and connections and wealth than he is interested in providing emotional support to his family.

Oliver Garland's life has to some extent been ruined by the fact that he has lost a chance to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court: We see in this character a combination of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, both conservative judges who were opposed in their attempt to gain the highest judicial position by those who believed that their conservative activism was not in keeping with the values either of the American public or of the U.S. Constitution. Of course, Bork was kept off the bench while Thomas was confirmed, perhaps in part because those liberals who opposed him were less stalwart in their attacks on a black man than they had been on a white man like Bork.

The maneuverings over how a Supreme Court position is gained (as described in the novel) do seem to mirror what happens in real life as political litmus tests are more important than intellectual prowess. (Or at least this appears to be the way in which Supreme Court justices are selected from the information that one gleans from the process from what one reads in newspaper accounts.)

The protagonist of the novel is not actually Oliver Gardner but his son, Talcott. After his father's death, Talcott becomes involved in investigating the circumstances surrounding his father's death (this is the Grisham-esque element of the novel). But this search for the truth about his father's death becomes for Talcott a much larger, more complicated search as he attempts to understand the nature of race, of power, of gender, and of politics in the United States.

The subjects that are debated by the characters in this novel are certainly not new ones. They ask us to consider the effect that a person's race has on him or her, the extent to which inherited wealth affects one's life, what difference feminism has or has not made in the lives of American women and how feminism (and gender) intersect with race. The importance of these issues ensures that we have all discussed them before.

What is so strikingly new about this novel for many Americans is that Tal's perspective on these issues is one that they may never have heard before. Most Americans who are at all aware of the issues and dynamics of political life in our nation are familiar with what is usually presented (by blacks as well as others) as the dominant black political view, which is one in which blacks are conscious of the ways in which their lives are circumscribed by their race and work more or less actively with other African-Americans to try to improve not only their own position but that of all black Americans.

This is most certainly not the position put forth by characters like Tal. His world in one in which class and wealth and the connections to the circles of power that these two bring are the most important things in life. Tal is aware of the importance of race, but it is for him a lesser factor than is his class, the connections to powerful people that he has inherited from his family.

At first this privileging of class over race seems to be a misrepresentation of the way in which the world (or at least the United States) actually works. We all know, after all, that race and gender are the more important qualifying (or disqualifying attributes) in an American's life. The picture that Stephen Carter - through Talcott - is presenting seems to be a false one.

But a closer reading of the text, and further reflection upon the experiences of men like Carter himself as well as other conservative black jurists like Clarence Thomas makes us question our initial reaction. The view of the author and of his protagonist seem alien to us not because we are unaware of the fact that there are powerful, wealthy blacks in the United States - or even that there are powerful, wealthy, conservative blacks in the United States. Any disbelief that we feel over Talcott's vision of the world as one in which personal connections among rich conservatives are what makes the political wheels go round stems not from a disbelief that there are blacks who think the way that Talcott does.

Rather, that disbelief stems from the fact that there are any type of Americans whose lives are like those of the characters in this novel. That there are indeed such people is the most important lesson of this book. Carter argues (via the actions of his characters) that the real aims of the political elite are to garner and maintain as much personal power for themselves as possible - regardless of the costs to other people or the inconvenience of principle. They will use means both legal and illegal, and certainly unethical as well as ethical stratagems, to gain and keep power.