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The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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No Clothes Yale University law professor Stephen L. Carter presents his first work of fiction with The Emperor of Ocean Park. Over the course of 650 pages, Carter presents a lengthy legal thriller that moves in a plodding manner that doesn’t encourage rapid page turning. I put the book down halfway through to take a breather that lasted several weeks. The narrator, Talcott Garland, is a law professor at a prestigious university. Through his eyes, readers enter the world of Black professionals and their networks of relationships. Tal’s father, Oliver, was a judge who was denied a seat on the Supreme Court when his confirmation hearings disclosed possible ties to an organized crime figure. The judge spent the years following as a popular speaker on the conservative talk circuit. The Emperor of Ocean Park begins with the judge’s mysterious death, and plods along as Tal tries to figure out what happened. A chess motif makes the structure of the book interesting, especially to serious chess fans. Here’s an excerpt of what to expect, from a section about two hundred pages in that describes the title. Addison and Marish are Tal’s siblings. Jack is the organized crime figure and Greg was Judge Oliver Garland’s aide who disclosed at the confirmation hearings that there had been contact between Jack and the judge. “Some years ago, on the tenth anniversary of my father’s humiliation, Time did a story about his life since leaving the bench. The two-page spread, revisited his angry books, quoted some of his stump speeches, and, in the interest of journalistic balance, gave some of his old enemies the chance to take fresh shots at him. Jack Zieglar’s name was mentioned three times, Addison’s twice, mine once, Mariah’s not at all, although her husband’s was, which seemed to displease her. A sidebar summarized the post-hearing life of Greg Haramoto, who, like my father, refused to be interviewed. But the main theme of the story was that, despite the frenetic activity that marked his days, my father was far lonelier than even many of his friends realized. The magazine noted that he was spending more and more time ‘at his summer home in Oak Bluffs,’ nearly always by himself, and although Time made the house sound far grander than it is (‘a five-bedroom cottage on the water’) and also got its name wrong (‘known to friends and family as simply “The Vineyard House”’), the article caught the tenor of his life exactly. The piece was titled, with faint, depressing irony, ‘The Emperor of Ocean Park.’ I was aghast and Mariah was furious. Addison, of course, could not be reached. As for my father, he shrugged it off, or pretended to: ‘The media,’ he said to me at Shepherd Street, ‘are all run by liberals. White liberals. Of course they are out to destroy me, because I know them for what they are. You see, Talcott, white liberals disapprove of black people they cannot control. My very existence is an affront to them.’ And returned to the reassuring pages of his National Review.” Considering the $4 million advance that Carter received for this novel and one to follow, readers deserve more than this book offers. Character names are a joke, including: the cleric, Father Freeman Bishop; Tal’s friend Rob Saltpeter; his son Bentley; a judge named Theo Mountain. Carter’s editor must have decided that at 650 pages, the publisher was getting more for their money, and little discipline was exercised in eliminating wasteful, unnecessary exposition and dialogue. Despite the length, readers close the book learning not as much as they want about key characters, their motivation and their humanity. Too many characters are one-dimensional. Every two hundred pages, the book earned another star, ending with a recommended rating. There was thought put into this book, and racial dynamics are exposed and described with clarity. If you can get through the first half of The Emperor of Ocean Park, go ahead to the finish line. Steve Hopkins, September 4, 2002
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