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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Black fiction from a middle class perspective, July 29, 2002
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 His daughter, Mariah, the cleverest of all, has withdrawn from intellectual life to become wife of a rich white banker and mother of a large brood.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.
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24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Carter's little pills, October 23, 2002
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.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Ponderous, August 31, 2002
By A Customer
"The Emperor of Ocean Park" is slightly longer than the phone book but not nearly as compelling. In the manner of bores, throughout the ages, Mr. Carter drones on and on with no concern about whether his audience is engaged or even awake. The language is awkward and stiff. Almost 700 pages and not one believable 3 dimensional character. Characters described as brilliant behave in an incredibly dense fashion, others described as evil, turn out to be just kinda' unpleasant. And every couple of pages Mr. Carter brings everything to a grinding halt to give us a lecture on traditional family values. The purported hero, a pudgy, charm less, sanctimonious slug is entirely unlikable. I think this was supposed to be a suspense novel but there is no tension. Most of the plot lines, such as they are, are tied up about 3/4 through, but Mr. Carter can't bring himself to end his opus. Worst of all, after slogging all the way to the end of this very long mess, the reader finds that the central mystery is never revealed. A real waste of time.
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