New England White: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Two lesser characters from Yale law professor Carter's bestselling first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002)—husband and wife Lemaster and Julia Carlyle—take center stage in his second, a compelling, literate page-turner that effortlessly blends a gripping whodunit with complex discussions of politics and race in contemporary America. Lemaster, one of the country's most influential African-Americans, has recently begun his tenure as president of a prestigious New England university. As he and Julia, who serves as a dean in the university's divinity school, drive home one snowy night, they happen upon the corpse of Professor Kellen Zant, a brilliant economist as well as Julia's former lover. The murder threatens to shatter not only the Carlyles' marriage but also the fragile psyche of their precocious but troubled daughter, Vanessa—and may affect the upcoming, bitterly contested race for the White House. Julia proves an unlikely but dogged investigator, who looks beyond the official verdict that Zant was killed in a chance encounter with a robber. In the richness of his characters, both major and minor, and the intelligence of his writing, Carter rivals Scott Turow. Expect another bestseller. 300,000 first printing; author tour. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Jabari Asim

No matter how our ancestors got here -- in the holds of slave ships, through the gates of Ellis Island, via a long trek across the Bering Straits, or thanks to a nifty gift of land from the British crown -- on these shores we can all become, for better or worse, something else entirely, at least for a while. In this sense, the United States is the ultimate land of make-believe, and the proud black strivers who populate Stephen L. Carter's new novel are among its most fervent pretenders. As members of the elite vanguard whom W.E.B. DuBois famously called the Talented Tenth, they convince themselves from time to time that our nation's once rock-solid color lines are now paper-thin abstractions that anyone can surmount. Well, anyone with good breeding, a capacious intellect and a briefcase brimming with postgraduate degrees.

And yet Carter's ambitious black achievers are constantly running up against the limits their skin imposes. In the lily-white 'burbs where his characters scheme and toil, African American homeowners are denied access to residents-only beaches, stranded motorists are refused assistance from their suspicious white neighbors, and even law professors harbor "the secret fear of false arrest that every black male in America nurtures somewhere deep within." Little embers of injustice and dissatisfaction are ever present, occasionally erupting into flames. What are we to make of Carter's parade of bonfires and vanities?

Leading his intriguing procession is Lemaster Carlyle, a stalwart black standout who somehow skips effortlessly over every hurdle. In The Emperor of Ocean Park, Carter's first novel, Carlyle smoothly outmaneuvered his rivals for a coveted appeals court judgeship. As New England White opens, he has just settled in as president of the university where he once labored as a mere law professor. His wife, Julia, is a deputy dean of the divinity school.

On a snowy November evening, Julia's long-ago lover, Kellen Zant, turns up dead. He appeared to be on the verge of solving a 30-year-old case involving a dead white girl and an accused black boy conveniently dispatched in a hail of police bullets. Tantalized by clues Zant left specifically for her, Julia resolves to get to the bottom of things, and find Zant's killer besides. The unraveling of this long and convoluted puzzle, as in Carter's previous mystery, is relayed in awkward fits and starts -- the least interesting aspects of a mostly enjoyable novel.

Carter's third-person narration does no favors for his pacing, and we can't help missing Talcott Garland, the earnest protagonist of The Emperor of Ocean Park. Sure, he was prone to pontificating, but he made up for it with his pitiable self-deprecations and fumbling attempts at love that indicated, in the end, he knew about as much as the rest of us. Which is to say, hardly anything. How did Talcott put it? "I have the sense that everybody else shares some crucial bit of knowledge that I have been denied." Don't we all.

But let's be honest: No one should read a Carter novel for the mystery.

We know by now that the author is only partly concerned with whodunit; he'd rather ponder why any of us does the things we do -- especially the bad things. For instance, we know it's wrong to cheat, lie, steal or wound, and yet hardly a day passes in which most of us don't commit at least one of these transgressions on some scale. Human weakness is troubling, fascinating stuff, and Carter has spent much of his career plumbing its depths.

He is, after all, an accomplished legal philosopher who has written persuasively about such cherished virtues as civility, integrity and faith. It's perversely pleasurable, then, to find that his fictional creations are reliably rude, dishonest and deliciously sinful.

Unlike most fictional plotters of high-class intrigue, Carter's connivers are often -- though not exclusively -- black. They're also rich and maybe not so different from you and me. They may talk about cultural heavyweights such as Isaiah Berlin and Martin Buber, but they can wallow in the gutter with all the vigor of an unlettered thug. And, like the gangsta rappers whom Lemaster Carlyle secretly loves (believe it!), they can be fairly obsessed with getting even. In The Emperor of Ocean Park, a prominent black judge sought lethal retribution -- from whites, no less -- for the death of his daughter. In the new novel, black pursuit of quid pro quo unfolds on a far grander scale -- but more on that later.

Like a modern-day version of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, Carter casts a critical light on the lifestyles of the black and privileged. In his novels, as in real life, they must demonstrate a voluminous knowledge of mainstream culture -- its history, politics, neuroses, etc. -- while serving tirelessly as spokespersons for and guardians of their own embattled slice of marginalia. Little wonder, then, as Carter dryly notes, "black Americans at the top of their professions seemed to feel the need from time to time to slough off the personas that brought success in the wider, white world -- and to escape the small whispers and slights whose existence they secretly feared -- and hang out instead with the successful of their own nation."

What does "hanging out" involve? The black bourgeoisie of Carter's quaint New England universe are neither charming nor discreet. They convene in social clubs, hold cotillions and swap salacious gossip, all the while "proudly and determinedly preserving all that was useless in African America." Carter ironically dubs these wannabe aristocrats the Clan, whose charter members often spend much of their energy making sure that access is denied to "the wrong sort of Negroes."

The clubs, notes one Clan doyenne, let the black elite "express solidarity with the community without actually having to do anything about it. They can congratulate each other on their achievements, and leave the striving for justice to those they have left behind." This is the Carter-esque skewering we've come to know and love.

But dismissing these hardworking professionals as pampered sell-outs would be far too simple, so Carter wisely endows them with an extra layer of complexity. He reveals that they haven't really turned their backs on pursuing justice; they've simply brought it over to the "dark" side. Which brings us back to Kellen Zant, whose cold, stiff corpse gets the action underway. Zant was certain that his sleuthing would eventually topple the most powerful white men in the country. He didn't live to discover the riveting tidbit that Carter shares with the rest of us: The white men in question -- senators, presidents, fixers -- are just pale imitations of genuine influence. The real juice belongs to a secret, handpicked society of brilliant, coldly manipulative black men. Yes, that's right: black men, large and completely in charge. This shadowy circle, to which Lemaster belongs, is composed of puppet masters whose strings stretch all the way to the highest realms of government, including the Oval Office.

"Their theory is that America gives nothing freely," Carter tells us. "They believe America won't cross the street to help a black man, not if it's not forced to. And so what they do, what they've done for a long time, is gather unflattering information about people in positions of power. Or people who might reasonably be expected to attain positions of power. . . . They don't think the identity of the party in power makes a dime's worth of difference in the lives of African Americans. All that matters to them is whether the people in power are people over whom they hold some influence."

These resolute operatives bring to mind the Seven Days, a similarly vengeance-minded crew chillingly portrayed in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Whenever an atrocity was committed against blacks, one of the Days was obliged to commit a similar brutality against whites. But that group's tit-for-tat missions, although bloody, are mere playground shenanigans compared to the machinations Carter suggests. His successful teasing out of such a bodacious notion -- holding our attention all the while -- is testament to his formidable storytelling. The novel's satisfying conclusion also points out how irrelevant genre labels have become. Technically, New England White is a mystery, but it's a fantasy most of all. Fitting fare, no doubt, in the land of make-believe.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (June 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375413626
• ISBN-13: 978-0375413629
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #361,704 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's a Great Story, But......., July 6, 2007

By	J. Belt "FloridaGirl88" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

After Emperor of Ocean Park, I could hardly wait for a second book from Stephen Carter. I even emailed him once to find why it was taking so long (no, he didn't respond) and so when I found out his new book was coming out last week, I rushed to my local bookstore (coupons in hand) and started reading. Once again, Carter has delivered an intriguing mystery while providing juicy tidbits about life in the rarified atmosphere of rich black intellectuals.

However, as much as I loved reading all 556 pages (whew!), I found that about halfway through the book, I started getting lost in all the details. There is just so much information he includes that after a while they start to detract from the story. More than once I thought "And who is this again?" Not that any of that stopped me from reading, it's that with so many characters, so many events, so much repetition, I was relieved to finally get to the big reveal. Yes, it was worth it find out whodunnit and why, but there is another message Carter delivers that members of both the darker nation and the paler nation will likely find themselves admitting, even if to no one other than to themselves.

My favorite scene in the book? When Julia finds herself in an unfamiliar neighborhood, knocking on doors and understanding that it's race, not money/class/privilege that people see first. And that truth is not lost on her.

63 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating plot, but....., July 9, 2007

By	Vaughn A. Carney (Vermont USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Does Knopf still employ editors? This book has a fascinating plot, but following it is like trying to find a jewel amid waist-deep weeds. There are just too many irrelevant characters, pointless digressions and tiresome, unnecessary details. At 556 pages, this book is about 200 pages too long, and slogging through it becomes a chore. Yes, Mr. Carter displays many wonderful turns of phrase, and yes, savoring a literate work by a black author who knows the racial score is very satisfying, but the knowledgeable reader must fight the urge to shout "For God's sake, man, get on with it!" The premise of this book is unique and brilliant; the execution, however, falls short.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Compelling Characters, but..., July 23, 2007

By	Richard A. Mitchell "Rick Mitchell" (candia, new hampshire United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The characters in this book were very compelling, especially Julia Carlyle, the wife of the university president, and her daughter. Mrs. Carlyle is an elitist African American raised at Dartmouth College and now an assistant dean at an Ivy League divinity school. As she works to uncover what is behind the murder of an ex-lover, she learns - for lack of a better term - how the other half lives. In her world, things get done because of who she is and to whom she is married - someone bothers her and he loses her job; she is an assistant dean without getting a degree - in her stratus it is who you are that matters. That group of "who you are" clashes with the more typically portrayed white privileged class which sets up the mystery portion of the book.

The book is a mystery only secondary to the exploration of the class strata among African Americans and how that compares and mirrors the white classes. The mystery is one for which Oliver Stone would be proud. It is conspiracy upon conspiracy upon complicity mixed with antagonism among whites and blacks and blacks and blacks. The black elite strata is manifested in elite clubs who pull strings behind the scenes in our society. Mr. Carter disavows the existence of such clubs in an afterword.

The characters truly carry this book, because it is s-l-o-o-o-w. I kept waiting for it to heat up; after all there are murders, conspiracies and intrigue, but somehow all of that was overcome and the pace remained slow throughout.

This is an intriguing look at American society from an elite black's view, which is a rare one to see and experience. Unfortunately, the slow pace detracted from the work.