http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i44/44b01201.htm
From the issue dated July 11, 2008
The Novel Worlds of Stephen L. Carter
His scholarship and best-selling fiction explore social concerns from different perspectives
By PETER MONAGHAN
New Haven, Conn.
Stephen L. Carter's third novel, Palace Council, due out this month, has murders, disappearances, and heartache; subversives, thugs, and government goons; striving young professionals, "czarinas" of black society, and politicians we all know.
Judging by the popularity of the author's first two novels, The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002) and New England White (2007) — published, like Palace Council, by Knopf — the book is likely to be sizzling summer reading.
The back story of the author, a leading black public intellectual and scholar, is as intriguing as the book's tale of murder. Carter is a well-known senior professor at Yale Law School and has been a participant in some of the most controversial academic and public debates in America. An African-American who clerked for Thurgood Marshall at the U.S. Supreme Court early in his career, Carter sparked dispute with his first book, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby (Basic Books, 1991). It detailed both the positive and negative sides of affirmative action in Carter's own career — not least the self-doubt that he said African-American professionals felt as a result of being perceived as unable to compete against the best. Was the policy's time, he asked, over?
The book was labeled neoconservative by some critics — especially within the black intelligentsia. At the time, Roger Wilkins, a leading civil-rights lawyer, now retired from George Mason University, told The Chronicle that Carter was one of a small group of black scholars whose questions about affirmative action were getting undue attention from the policy's opponents — while Carter himself was reaping its benefits.
Still, some reviewers saw something more radical in Carter's charge that affirmative action, while generally well intentioned, was a salve to the conscience of a society that "prefers its racial justice cheap." In The Atlantic Monthly, James Carroll, now a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, praised Carter's "maverick brilliance."
A practicing Christian in an academic world not always sympathetic to religion, Carter took up religion in his next book, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (Basic Books, 1993). While supporting the separation of church and state, he argued that religious voices must be part of the public debate. Pundits of all political stripes, he wrote, needed to get over thinking of religious devotion as "a hobby" or "something that mature, public-spirited adults do not use as the basis for politics." Predictably, he again provoked plenty of reaction.
The fact that Carter has never hewed to a strict liberal or conservative line has always complicated his reception. For example, after defending religion's role in public discussion in one book, in God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics (Basic Books, 2000), he took the religious right to task for becoming too involved in partisan politics. Indeed, for some critics, Carter's evenhandedness has appeared a fault, a tendency to hem and haw — and to oversimplify public debates.
Carter continues to write nonfiction, although not publishing any new books in the genre since 2000. Is his fiction, then, a flight from criticism? Or is it a place to explore his themes through character, plot, and action?
In conversation here at the law school, where he has taught since 1982, the affable and forthright Carter speaks at an astonishing clip, as if he has twice as much to say as time allows. (His seven nonfiction volumes in nine years, three novels in six years, and more of both genres planned suggest as much.)
While all his nonfiction books deal with the major themes and players in American law and politics, his novels focus on the key institutions in American society. In The Emperor of Ocean Park, it is the bench, as a professor at an Ivy League law school investigates the death of his father, a conservative judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court mysteriously imploded. (One of Carter's nonfiction books was about the failings of the appointments process.) In New England White, it is academe: A college president and former White House counsel — a Barbados-born Liberals for Bush aficionado of gangsta rap — must solve a murder with his charming but adulterous wife, a dean of divinity.
Palace Council is set in the highest reaches of government and politics, as if the author has wandered into intrigues even larger than the scholarly world offers. It tells the story of a secret plot to use smears, terror, and murder to change political fortunes. A striving Harlem fiction writer, Eddie Wesley, gets pulled into trying to unravel the conspiracy, all the while pursuing an unrequited love for a society belle. The investigation takes 20 years — the real "60s," Carter stresses as he speaks to me. "They began when the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation and ended when Nixon resigned in 1974."
The book is, says Carter, his "effort to write a thrilling story that is also a romance, but at the same time to illuminate an era in which there was a sense of lost American innocence." It is arresting to hear a black intellectual speak of the 60s in those terms; preceding decades had hardly been renowned for fair treatment of African-Americans. "You can see the 50s as the period of enormous American optimism, the can-do spirit," Carter tells me. "By the mid-70s, between Watergate and Vietnam, there was a loss of confidence, a loss of self-belief."
As the hope of the beginning of the period turns into the despair of the end in Palace Council, the novel brings to life many of the issues that helped tear the era apart: how to achieve social progress, the nature of race relations, African-American class construction, black power, and religious practice. Those kinds of tangled social dilemmas run throughout Carter's work.
Knopf took a chance on Carter qua novelist on the strength of the manuscript for Emperor, says Paul Bogaards, the publisher's executive director for publicity. The company also knew, he says, that Carter could stoke public interest. The author's nonfiction, including book reviews, essays, and a column that he often wrote for Christianity Today, all spoke plainly to complex public debates; they confronted, but didn't affront (in keeping with references in some of his nonfiction subtitles to "manners," "morals," and "meditation"). Above all, he toed no line of public expectations for an African-American intellectual.
Carter himself says that he firmly believes that "a lot of work as a scholar proceeds from the notion that arguments matter, that ideas matter, that it's not just about getting the right answer. It's important to have right processes and to reason things through." In all his work, he professes a deep, old-fashioned faith in "the virtues of tolerance and reason, and respectful disagreement," as he puts it. Mind you, he adds, "I'm not saying I always exemplify them. I'm saying I believe in them."
Even in fiction, he says, "I try very hard to paint people on different sides of an idea as having a serious case to make." Thus even many of his baddies are portrayed with nuance — in Palace Council, the much-maligned J. Edgar Hoover is, in part, just a guy doing his job.
Knopf's publishing instincts were correct. Carter's first two novels sold well, more than 225,000 and 105,000 hardback copies, respectively. One report said the publisher had won a bidding war, paying Carter a princely $4.2-million for a two-book deal. (A Knopf official was quoted citing that figure in 2001, but now denies it. Asked for confirmation, Carter says: "I was raised not to discuss money in public. Sorry.")
Colleagues wonder how he does it all. "He's written in every venue you could imagine. He's obviously someone who puts his head down and writes," says John L. Jackson Jr., an associate professor of communication and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's clear he's writing what he wants to write about, not necessarily what other people want to hear."
What few have doubted throughout Carter's career is that he has achieved, in a way most academics can only dream of, a public voice.
Palace Council is all the more compelling for the way Carter creates a heady mix of fiction genres more seamlessly than in his earlier novels — hard-boiled, noir, whodunit, political thriller, romance, historical novel. Plus there is plenty of old-fashioned, potboiler suspense: false leads, peril at chapter endings, unforeseen events that at times seem a little contrived. Yet in the novel, the plot hums far more than it clunks, thanks in good part to Carter's increasingly elegant turns of phrase — his ability to suggest at once the story's action and his characters' inner lives and social worlds:
"Every corpse on which Eddie Wesley had ever laid eyes had belonged, once, to someone he knew, for his familiarity with the species flowed entirely from encounters at funeral parlors and what were called 'home-going services' at his father's church."
While unquestionably didactic, Carter sticks to the issues that concern him. Consider the injection of religion in his fiction. "It's strange to me," he says, "that there is so much fiction in which people have no religious beliefs unless it's part of the story. My characters mostly have them, the same way they have heights, and weights, and skin colors."
Some of his characters, however, are alien to Carter, and his writing conveys a sense that he has discovered their motivations and personalities through imagining them into existence. His protagonist in Palace Council negotiates secret societies and fraternities; he inhabits back rooms and byways of black social and political life that are hidden from most Americans. Carter, too, had to school himself in such subjects. "I didn't grow up in a family where we had debutantes and things like that," he says.
Carter was raised in a number of neighborhoods of very different racial makeup: Harlem; the tony, white Cleveland Park district of Washington, D.C.; and mixed-race Ithaca, N.Y. He was the middle-class son of a Great Society government lawyer who became a Cornell University business-school professor. His family was Episcopalian, but he has said that he had no real religious consciousness until it was awakened the year he spent, during ninth grade, living with an observant Jewish family.
He attended Stanford University, and then, as he pointedly described in his first book, he was rejected by Harvard Law School because admissions officers thought he was white; soon after, he was boosted by affirmative action into Yale Law School. That, he wrote, permitted him to prove himself. He served on Yale's law review and later clerked for Justice Marshall. (One indication of his drive is that, even while working for the justice, he was formulating and taking notes for his first novel.) After Washington, Carter returned to Yale to teach and pursue such research interests as patent and copyright law and the separation of powers — and to write books on divisive issues like race and the legal status of religion.
Indeed, race relations — between black and white, and within and among echelons of black society — are key in some of Carter's most influential work, and certainly to all three of his novels. He treats these issues with evident earnestness but also often with sharp wit (a quality that emerges less, in person, than his seriousness). Throughout his three novels, he keeps up a sly, nuanced deployment of the terms "darker nation" and "paler nation" to acknowledge, for example, the dynamics of racial and social consciousness within black America (the former) about white America (the latter). That provides readers entree into the mixture of grievance, protectiveness, and bemusement that Carter's black characters feel toward the majority culture.
Fiction seems a place where Carter can make the social issues he covers beguilingly slippery. Palace Council's black characters are as likely to be supporters of Tricky Dick Nixon as of true-blue JFK (both of whom appear in the action).
Carter's novels may be as suitable for beach blankets as for college reading-room armchairs, and reviewers have generally been impressed. In The New Yorker, for example, the novelist Joyce Carol Oates praised The Emperor of Ocean Park, noting the "audacious originality" of its heaped-on subplots and flashbacks, and the skill of Carter's "masterly thumbnail portraits" and "acerbic asides" whose targets were often academic pretensions and venalities.
To be sure, critics have also noted a preacher in Carter. Consider some of his titles, like Integrity (Basic Books, 1996), in which he calls for good management of law, marriage, sports, journalism, government, and much else, and Civility: Manners, Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy (Basic Books, 1998). There he draws on 18th-century sermons about loving one's neighbor to suggest that being a good citizen requires embracing certain "prepolitical" traits that "we should all struggle to exemplify."
Carter was an occasional Camp David guest when Time magazine, in 1996, dubbed him "among the Clintons' candidates for official moralist of the center-left." In Washington Monthly, the journalist Adam Goodheart, reviewing Civility, pointed out the "slightly weary tone" of a man who knew he would "be giving the same sermon on countless Sundays to come."
But it's been the charge of straddling the line on many issues that has most bedeviled Carter. Walter K. Olson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, faulted him in an otherwise flattering National Review critique of Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby for "an overdrawing of distinctions, so that his best insights tend to be preceded by a hem and followed by a haw."
That should not be viewed as a fault, says the University of Pennsylvania's Jackson. "It's testament to his capacity to really think about issues from all sides, at the very least both sides, rather than from entrenched ideological positions," he says. In other words, Carter is ill fit for "this sound-bite culture of ours," suggests Jackson, whose specialties include the roles of mass media and religion in public life. Consider the nuances in Carter's approach to religion in the public sphere: "He takes religion seriously as a scaffolding for talking about social life, and our connections to other people, but there are better and worse ways to deploy one's faith," Jackson says. "He avoids the pitfalls of the ideologically driven, who use religion to close off civil conversation as opposed to opening it up."
The specter of Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby endures, however. Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a public-policy research organization, says in an e-mail message that "Stephen Carter remains a nightmare for supporters of affirmative action. Published 17 years ago, during the first Bush administration, Reflections remains one of the most devastating critiques of affirmative-action policies in higher education ever written." Because Carter was both a beneficiary of the policy and a critic of keeping it in place, "he couldn't be written off as a right-wing extremist, like Clarence Thomas," says Kahlenberg. "The book wasn't an angry screed, but a nuanced and thoughtful discussion that acknowledged the downside of affirmative action."
Randall L. Kennedy, a professor of law at Harvard University and another sometimes contrarian voice, reflects in his recent Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (Pantheon Books) on the kind of response Carter received. Describing how difficult it is for dissenting black intellectuals to define their identities, he says that the Yale professor may be right when he "maintains that, at least with respect to certain topics, most notably affirmative action, a prevailing orthodoxy exerts undue pressure, stigmatizing dissident positions to such an extent that people holding heterodox ideas either silence themselves or speak out knowing that they will pay a frightful price with their reputations." Kennedy adds, however, that while Carter's libertarian take on group advancement is attractive, "it fails to recognize a central sociological reality: Collective action necessarily entails coercion or at least the threat of coercion."
Some other observers have wryly pointed out that teaching at Yale and getting huge publication advances hardly constitute paying a "frightful price."
In any case, Carter is unlikely to remain quiet. He is at work on two new nonfiction books, one on "just-war theory," the other on why books — "not just reading or literacy, but physical books" — are "important to democracy." The first topic is, by its nature in today's world, controversial. Carter may well be able to make both topics contentious.
He says he will continue to juggle his nonfiction and fiction. "I wanted to write stories my whole life," he says with evident pleasure. "When I was a little boy, I used to write what I would call my novels. I would get little notebooks, of eight pages, and write stories in them."
He does acknowledge that he would like both his fiction and his nonfiction to reform the institutions that "I care about." (That, he says, explains his lampooning of academe.) But he also claims, not altogether plausibly, that his fiction is driven by characters, not issues.
Still, critics rarely take detective stories or popular fiction to task for too much subtlety. Canvassing all sides, at least in fiction, is not to hem nor haw.
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
