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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
The drippy Talcott finds himself in considerable danger, but like any good son or thriller protagonist, he's hellbent on solving the case. Fortunately, Talcott, despite said drippiness, is also the vehicle for Carter's best moments. When he observes the "paler nation," Talcott suffers a reflexive physical reaction: "My vision is suddenly overlaid with bright splotches of red, a thing that happens from time to time when my connection to the darker nation and its oppression is most powerfully stimulated." It happens when he's talking to colleagues and while he's teaching: "I glare at the cocky student and see, for a horrible moment, the future, or maybe just the enemy: young, white, confident, foolish, skinny, sullen, multiply pierced, bejeweled, dressed in grunge, cornsilk hair in a ponytail, utterly the cynical conformist, although he thinks he is an iconoclast ... I read in his posture insolence, challenge, perhaps even the unsubtle racism of the supposedly liberal white student who cannot quite bring himself to believe that his black professor could know more than he."
He's critical of his own prejudices, too; sometimes the civil rights era and the Gilded Age clash with bristling dark humor: "I suddenly understand the passion of many black nationalists of the sixties who opposed affirmative action, warning that it would strip the community of the best among its potential leaders, sending them off to the most prestigious colleges, and turning them into ... well, into young corporate apparatchiks in Brooks Brothers suits, desperate for the favor of powerful white capitalists." And even when Carter's preachy, it's not boring: "that is the level to which the darker nation had been reduced: being unable to influence the course of a single event in white America, we waste our precious time and intellectual energy maligning each other, as though we best serve the cause of racial progress by kicking other black folks around."
Yet Carter's protagonist, for all his smart commentary on Ivy League dynamics, the law, religion, affirmative action, insolent whites and black conservatism, is encumbered by his own self-loathing. To Talcott, everyone around him is more beautiful, more charismatic, more brilliant, more accomplished, more comfortable at those stupid cocktail parties. Here's Talcott on his brother: "Addison has wit and style and grace, none of which I possess." Talcott on his colleague, Lemaster Carlyle: "He stands miles above me in the school's unwritten hierarchy, and is adored by everybody in the building, and most alumni as well, for he is also a nearly perfect politician ... His perfect wife, Julia, is as small and dark and cute as Lemaster himself." Kimmer is always sexy, even when she's treating him like shit. She's "stunning as ever," even in a bathrobe.
Ostensibly, Carter's trying to pit his hero against the world and make Talcott's struggle seem truly impossible. But not only does Carter convince us that Talcott's rather lame, the rest of the characters seem directly drawn from the superlatives page of some boarding school yearbook. Rather than drawing out their complexity, Carter presents the sum of their achievements. Imagine all these enormous egos trying to have a conversation; often the dialogue drags.
But there's something subtly poignant about what Carter's going for, though he doesn't allude to that pain directly until well into the novel. As if assessing the society he's thus far created, he declares, "The social scene, so inexplicably wasteful and pretentious to its critics, refreshed and reinforced those who whirled through it, strengthening them to face another day, another week, another month, another year of expending their prodigious talents in a nation unprepared to reward them for their abilities." "The Emperor of Ocean Park" reeks of this exhaustion.
And somehow, in this atmosphere, you understand the Emperor, and why he, or Carter, forced all these characters to figure out what the hell he did and what the hell was wrong with him. He was a prominent man who failed, because he tried too hard, because he was flawed, because he was paranoid, because people resented him. Or, maybe, he failed because he was a man trying to protect his family in a world that he didn't trust. Even the great Oliver Garland was haunted by the rules of chess, where the player with the white pieces always gets to move first. In the end, his money, power and position as beacon of the law couldn't get him justice -- the real, personal kind of justice that actually matters.
It's possible that Stephen Carter tried too hard trying to squeeze in all his pet subjects and devise a smart, intricate thriller. It's too bad. The secrets of a dead, rich, powerful black conservative, embroiled in D.C. politics and harrowed by family tragedy, make for a story that's compelling enough on its own.
