Buzzflash
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Newsvine
Reddit
THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK.
By Stephen L. Carter.
Knopf. 657 pp. $26.95.
-
Warriors for Zion--in California
Jon Wiener: Accusations by right-wing Zionists of anti-Semitism at the University of California, Irvine, are suspect at best.
-
City of Fear
Jon Wiener: A new book explores the historical ties between African-American and Japanese-American communities in Los Angeles.
-
J. Edgar Hoover, Author
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Jon Wiener: A new book reveals the FBI Director's distinctive relationship with his publisher.
-
Judging Thomas
Jon Wiener: A close look at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas reveals a deeply conservative and increasingly bitter man.
-
Letters
-
Al Franken's Rising Fortunes
Progressives, Liberals, & The American Left
Jon Wiener: It's early in the game, but his bid to unseat Minnesota Republican Senator Norm Coleman is gaining strength.
-
President Rudy
Jon Wiener: How much worse a president would Rudy Giuliani be than George W. Bush? Author Kevin Baker counts the ways.
But I read the first page in a bookstore, wanted to read more, bought the book, and spent the next week completely absorbed by The Emperor of Ocean Park. Stephen Carter's protagonist-narrator, Talcott Garland, is a black law professor at an Ivy League school who is immensely sympathetic--definitely not a black conservative like, say, Clarence Thomas or Thomas Sowell. The black right-wing activist in the book is actually Talcott's father, a judge who had been denied a seat on the Supreme Court after being humiliated in confirmation hearings by evidence that he had ties to a mob boss. As the book opens, the father has just died, and the plot centers on Talcott's quest to discover his father's secrets. The impetus comes from menacing strangers demanding to know "the arrangements" Talcott's father had made before his death.
The book includes rich portraits of extended family in the African-American upper-crust, descriptions of work in an elite law school and revelations of the subtle racial insults that even a black law professor endures regularly. And the clues left behind by the difficult father for the struggling son seem to refer to a nineteenth-century chess problem, which itself turns out to be a fascinating subplot. At the end, Carter's immensely satisfying solution combines the personal with the political and ultimately resolves Talcott's struggle with his father.
Stephen Carter is at work on a second novel; he says some of the characters from this one will reappear. I can hardly wait.
- Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
- If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
