The Emperor of Ocean Park [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Stephen L. Carter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 4, 2002

An extraordinary fiction debut: a large, stirring novel of suspense that is, at the same time, a work of brilliantly astute social observation. The Emperor of Ocean Park is set in two privileged worlds: the upper crust African American society of the eastern seaboard—old families who summer on Martha’s Vineyard—and the inner circle of an Ivy League law school. It tells the story of a complex family with a single, seductive link to the shadowlands of crime.

The Emperor of the title, Judge Oliver Garland, has just died, suddenly. A brilliant legal mind, conservative and famously controversial, Judge Garland made more enemies than friends. Many years before, he’d earned a judge’s highest prize: a Supreme Court nomination. But in a scene of bitter humiliation, televised across the country, his nomination collapsed in scandal. The humbling defeat became a private agony, one from which he never recovered.

But now the Judge’s death raises even more questions—and it seems to be leading to a second, even more terrible scandal. Could Oliver Garland have been murdered? He has left a strange message for his son Talcott, a professor of law at a great university, entrusting him with “the arrangements”—a mysterious puzzle that only Tal can unlock, and only by unearthing the ambiguities of his father’s past. When another man is found dead, and then another, Talcott—wry, straight-arrow, almost too self-aware to be a man of action—must risk his career, his marriage, and even his life, following the clues his father left him.

Intricate, superbly written, often scathingly funny, The Emperor of Ocean Park is a triumphant work of fiction, packed with character and incident—a brilliantly crafted tapestry of ambition, family secrets, murder, integrity tested, and justice gone terribly wrong.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A complex, smart mystery filled with intrigue, drama, and more than a little danger awaits in Stephen L. Carter's engaging debut novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park. After the funeral of his powerful father (a federal judge whose nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court became a public scandal), Talcott Garland, an African American law professor at an Ivy League university, is left to unravel the meaning of a cryptic note and carry out "the arrangements" his father left behind. Armed with fortitude and familial devotion--though paranoid of his wife's fidelity--Talcott soon finds himself in an investigation that entangles him with a number of questionable Washington, D.C., denizens, including attorneys and government officials, law professors, the FBI, shady underworld figures, chess masters, and friends and family. All the while Talcott tries not to hurt his attorney wife's chance for a judicial nomination--and their fragile marriage--but the closer he comes to unraveling his father's dark secrets, the more dangerous things become.

Clocking in at over 650 pages, the novel could easily have been streamlined; many of Talcott's thoughts are unnecessarily repeated. But Carter's storytelling skills are adept: tension builds, surprises are genuine, clues are not handed out freely. The prose, while somewhat meandering, can be crisp and insightful, as demonstrated in Carter's description of the misguided paths of young attorneys who sacrifice

all on the altar of career... at last arriving... at their cherished career goals, partnerships, professorships, judgeships, whatever kind of ships they dream of sailing, and then looking around at the angry, empty waters and realizing that they have arrived with nothing, absolutely nothing, and wondering what to do with the rest of their wretched lives.

--Michael Ferch

From Publishers Weekly

Carter, a Yale law professor and distinguished conservative African-American intellectual known for his nonfiction (The Culture of Disbelief), has written a first-rate legal thriller guaranteed to broaden his audience. The narrator, Talcott Garland, is a law professor at Elm Harbor University whose occasional Carteresque editorializing about politics and justice are saved from didacticism by his abiding existential loneliness. The mystery at the heart of the novel stems from Tal's father's disgrace: Judge Oliver Garland (a Robert Bork meets Clarence Thomas type) was nominated by Ronald Reagan for a Supreme Court seat, but brought down in the Senate hearings when it was revealed that he had a friendship with Jack Ziegler, a wild-card former CIA agent now rumored to be an organized crime kingpin. When the judge dies of what looks like a heart attack and Ziegler turns up at his funeral, Tal is initiated into a quest to uncover mysterious "arrangements" his father made in the event of his untimely demise. Various shady entities observe Tal chasing down the judge's clues, which include a cryptic note ("you have little time.... Excelsior! It begins!") and derive from chess strategy. Meanwhile, Talcott is going through a rough patch: his wife, Kimmer, a high-powered attorney, is probably cheating on him, his Elm Harbor law school colleagues are suspicious of him and a fake FBI man is following him around. As Talcott digs deeper, he uncovers a vein of corruption that runs all the way to the top, and his own life becomes threatened. This thriller, which touches electrically on our sexual, racial and religious anxieties, will be the talk of the political in-crowd this summer.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 672 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (June 4, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375413634
• ISBN-13: 978-0375413636
• Product Dimensions: 6.6 x 1.7 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (404 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,087,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Black fiction from a middle class perspective, July 29, 2002

By 

Antonio (Bogotá, Colombia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Emperor of Ocean Park (Hardcover)

Although black influence may be discerned in many strands of modern popular culture, from sports to stand-up comedy, from music to fashion and movies, one couldn't say that this has also been the case for fiction. Professor Carter's book is a welcome first step in populating a compelling plot-driven narrative with characters we haven't heard from before (or at least, not to my knowledge). In "The Emperor of Ocean Park" black university graduates with high-powered jobs and all sorts of material comforts are resolutely center-stage. In Philip Roth's "The Human Stain", the main character must resign his blackness to achieve success and power in the academical world. Carter's characters never resign their race to be successful in the white man's world. The main voice is Talcott Garland's. He is a lawyer in his forties, a professor of law in an ivy-league-ish university, which in spite of Carter's denial in a post-scriptum is a straigth forward rendition of Yale Law School, where the author teaches. Garland is a complex man, not a cypher, surely a cut above the generic "cut-and-paste" renditions typical of modern popular fiction. He is slightly overweight, not very likeable (he is aloof and emotionally remote), very much his father's son. The father, the eponymous "Emperor of Ocean Park", is Oliver Garland, known in the book as "The Judge", a composite of Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Judge Robert Bork and famous intellectual Thomas Sowell. A moderately conservative civil rights lawyer, he is appointed to a federal judgeship in the District of Columbia Appelate Court where he moves increasingly to the right. In the Reagan era he is nominated to the Supreme Court, but he must withdraw his candidacy when certain sordid associations become known to the public. He then joins a Washington D.C. firm as counsel and rakes in fat fees as a very popular public speaker. The Judge has shaped his children sometimes in ways he didn't mean to. The first born, Addison, is a rebel who refuses to be subject to his fathers very exacting standards of emotional self-control. His daughter, Mariah, the cleverest of all, has withdrawn from intellectual life to become wife of a rich white banker and mother of a large brood. Talcott has fled the rough and tumble of political life to become a tenured professor, and is stuck with Kimberley, a woman he adores, although she doesn't love him and may be cheating on him. A third daughter, Abby, died long ago, run over by a car that then fled the scene of the accident. This death is the catalyst of all that happens afterwards. The Judge is dead at the beginning of the book, and Talcott is quickly assailed by all sorts of shady figures who are looking for the Judge's arrangements. Talcott has no idea of what this means, and he struggles till the book's very end to find the arrangements and keep himself and his family alive. There is a complex chess problem (whose relevance is perhaps less clearly conveyed than the author intended) and several sub-plots to keep the reader occupied. Those thinking about buying the book should not be dissuaded by its heft. The book is a page turner and it has the right mixture of plot, action and rumination to keep the reader interested. It is also evidence that a book may be compelling without a single overtly sexual set-piece, without unnecessary profanity and without obsessive concern by fashionable slang or luxury good brands. This book will still be readable in fifty years without a special dictionary.

Many people have commented on the detailed rendition on the specifics of middle class lives. The big surprise is that these lives are similar to those of their white counterparts. Middle class blacks are hard working achievers, sometimes hindered by emotional distance and obsessive self-pondering. Perhaps one key point is that this is not the middle class as such that we are regarding, but the upper-middle class, with their large townhouses in Washington D.C. ("the Gold Coast") and their summer places in the Vineyard and the Hamptons.

We should expect this book to be slaughtered in the movie version, with Denzel Washington as Talcott, Morgan Freeman as the Judge, Hale Berry as Kimberley and Angela Basset as Maxine. Gene Hackman would be a good Justice Worthington. Read the book before you see the inevitable movie. It will only spoil the fun if you do otherwise.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Carter's little pills, October 23, 2002

By 

Tim Bradley (Altadena, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Emperor of Ocean Park (Hardcover)

Your Honor, the People will gladly stipulate that, if he will just move the story along, Professor Carter is uncommonly erudite and well-informed, culturally astute, and can hold forth on everything from Hindu deities to semiotics to classical music to minivans, as he proves in this book.

Every paragraph in his torturous and tortuous first novel is a rumination on or digression from the one before--physicists need look no further to discover the universe's longest distance between two points. In one spot, nearly three pages go by between the first and second rings of a phone. In another, one sentence is 25 lines long. The author must've made a deal with Knopf to be paid by the syllable (about three for a dollar if the reported amount of his advance is correct).

Story-wise, Carter has written a good 350-page yarn that takes him 650 pages to tell. A more apt title might've been Jerk Like Me since none of the characters is a bit likeable. As he takes three pages in an afterword to point out, they and the locations are fictional. It's a great relief to know that he himself is not the whiny, racist, snotty, law-professor second son of the title's deceased patriarch, who is still despotic despite being dead.

I have never written a novel--it seems so much easier to get one from Amazon. But if I did, I'm sure I would be infected with the same "first-novelitis" that befell Carter, the need to shoehorn into the tome every arcane bit of minutia, insightful observation and belabored turn of phrase I'd ever encountered in my life until then (I am the anti-Proust). If that's all out his system now, Carter's second novel could be a true masterpiece.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book from a great thinker, May 23, 2006

By 

D. Milton - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Emperor of Ocean Park (Paperback)

After reading Carter's earlier works -- The Culture of Disbelief, Integrity, and Civility -- I was curious to see what kind of novel he would write.

It was a joy to read about non-stereotypical black American characters, i.e. those who are are not drug lords and gangsters. I also enjoed following along as some of Carter's philosophies were woven into the plot.

The judge was a man tortured and I found the circumtances that led to his demise revealing. The book talks a lot about drawing lines and moving forward. Also revealed is the importance of not crossing some lines. Period.

Carter's protagonist was called to live a certain ideal and that ideal sometimes left the character seeming wimpy, but considered from the perspective of the calling that the Reverend Young explained beautifully, Tal's inability to really handle things made a lot of sense.

On the subject of Tal, I appreciated that he was human and not a superman, and thus, situations sometimes got away from him.

Carter handled some of the subleties of race well, as well as the impact on race relations by relativism. Tal was not to blame for everything that happened, but that didn't matter to his colleagues, who really, pretty much were interested in protecting their own. Carter's point here, I believe, was that the Good Ole Boys' club still exists, and if you're not in it, you'll find yourself flailing on the outside with no protection or hope.

I loved the length of the book, as the meatier a book, the better as far as I am considered. Those who prefer 200 pagers would probably want to look in a different section of the store. This book is for readers and thinkers.