Poisoned Ivy

Much as I hate to, I'm going to start by talking about the damn money. I'm only doing it because almost everyone else is.

It's not just the author profiles and publishing-trade columns, but seemingly every other review of The Emperor of Ocean Park that mentions, way before stuff like plot or characters, the $4.2 million Knopf paid Yale Law professor Stephen L. Carter for this first novel and another to come. Most, if not all, of these pieces seem incredulous that an academic-of-color could reap the kind of dough-re-mi for thriller writing that the John Grishams and Tom Clancys could command. Pundits of both colors--or of what Carter's novel continually refers to as "the darker nation" and "the paler nation"--sound pleasantly surprised that an African-American male could earn some pop-cultural buzz by being paid millions of dollars for doing something that doesn't require a ball or a microphone.

I'm guessing Carter has the grace to be appreciative about all this. But I'm also guessing that the author of Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby is equipped with inner radar delicate enough to pick up faint signals of condescension (or worse) beneath all this hype. Sifting through the reviews so far, especially those taking Carter to the woodshed, one detects glimmers of doubt as to whether the book or the author deserves all that money and attention. No matter that Carter, Yale Law's first tenured African-American professor, has established his credentials as a legal scholar and public intellectual, having published seven nonfiction books whose subjects include values (Integrity, Civility), faith in public life (The Culture of Disbelief, God's Name in Vain) and, of course, race (Reflections...). Black people have been through enough job interviews to recognize the skeptically arched eyebrows in key precincts of Book-Chat Nation over Carter's big score. The eyebrows ask: Is the book worth all this fuss--and all that damn money?

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