|
Article Excerpt
THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK. By Stephen L. Carter. New York: Random House, Inc. 2002. Pp. vi, 657. $26.95.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald (1)
I. THE AUTHOR'S NOTE
In his debut novel, Stephen Carter (2) takes pains to explain that although he and his protagonist, Talcott Garland (who goes by "Misha"), share superficial aspects of their identities, they should not be confused as twins. (3) Carter and Misha may both be middle-aged professors at prestigious East Coast universities who grew up as members of the African-American elite that summered on Martha's Vineyard as segregation was officially ending; and they may both be passionate about chess. Beyond that, however, they are dissimilar. Carter drives no faster than the speed limit and otherwise leads a life that appears to be boring beyond reproach according to glossy magazine profiles. (4) At the same time, his non-alter-ego fantasizes guiltily about an affair with a mysterious woman even as he entertains paranoid visions of his wife cheating on him with her boss. Carter continues on a career of academic reflections as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale, with a special interest in expressions of religious faith in public life. (5) Misha ultimately faces a showdown with an unexpected figure that resolves the political scandal that ended his late father's political career, albeit leaving him with unanswered questions.
Indeed, Carter has been mocked with good humor for his extensive author's note, which concludes the book and was intended to preempt casual conjectures about the relationship of life to art, the extraordinary detail of which ironically only prompts such guesswork. (6) Carter notes, for example, that he has placed a Brooks Brothers store in its old location rather than at its new corner to facilitate Misha's escape in one of several chase scenes (p. 656).
There are more significant changes, such as the creation of an alternate universe differing from reality only in the not insignificant matter of appointment of Justices to the Supreme Court. Instead of President George Bush naming Clarence Thomas, a conservative appellate judge who is African American, President Ronald Reagan names Misha's father, a conservative appellate judge who is African American. Thomas is in fact confirmed following controversy over allegations of sexual harassment, but the elder Garland is in fiction withdrawn from consideration following controversy over allegations of ties to organized crime (pp. 49-50). Judge Garland is the titular "Emperor of Ocean Park," the title having been bestowed in a magazine article summarizing his disgrace (p. 213). (7)
II. A LITERARY MANIFESTO OF THE BLACK BOURGEOISIE
Carter's book fulfills the mandate of Tom Wolfe's "literary manifesto for the new social novel," which appealed for a return to realistic narrative. (8) The book can also be read as an updating of Franklin Frazier's Black Bourgeoisie, the definitive but despised report that gave its name to a racial class. (9)
In 1989, Wolfe, who invented new journalism, penned a much-discussed essay advocating that fiction writers offer "a slice of life, a cross section, that provide[s] a true and powerful picture of individuals and society" and "wallows so enthusiastically in the dirt of everyday life and the dirty secrets of class envy" that it is "easily understood and obviously relished by the mob, i.e., the middle class." (10) Wolfe presented his own novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, as a case in point. He specifies various examples of worthwhile subject matters, racial tensions chief among them.
In 1956, Frazier, already a distinguished sociologist trained by Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, published a monograph in France arguing that the black bourgeoisie were a self-deluded class who would never be accepted as either black or bourgeoisie. When it was released in the United States, it confirmed Frazier's standing as an astute student of African-American family life, but it also brought him widespread denunciation within the society he depicted. (11) Frazier claimed that "the black bourgeoisie has been uprooted from its 'racial' tradition and as a consequence has no cultural roots in either the Negro world or the white world." (12) Frazier detected an inferiority complex coupled with relatively superior wealth (compared to other blacks) that "enabled [the black bourgeoisie] to propagate false notions about their place in American life and to create a world of make-believe." (13) Frazier hypothesized that the black bourgeoisie hated lower-class African Americans and sought to distance themselves from their slave past, just as they were hated by whites with whom they sought to identify themselves as peers. They were faux aristocrats.
In passing, Carter's Misha remarks that Frazier was right. He observes that "the best of black Washington charged about in mad imitation of white people's foolishness," (p. 283) even adopting the paper bag test for admission to a fraternity or sorority--that a pledge must be lighter in skin tone than the light brown of a paper bag (p. 266).
For some white readers, this milieu is all a novelty. At least one leading reviewer was taken aback to learn that there existed, alongside the white upper class, a black upper class. The novelist Ward Just, writing in The New York Times, noted his own amazement when invited by presidential advisor Vernon Jordan, who is African American, to a party for President Bill Clinton: "Most of the guests are rich and black." (14) In praising Carter's novel, Just declares it "a window, the only one I know of" into this "hidden world." (15) Misha anticipates as much. He posits that there is "a larger slice of financially comfortable African America than most white Americans probably think exists outside the sports and entertainment worlds" (p. 19).
Even for those with more of an acquaintance with this universe, Carter provides "a slice of life, a cross section" which "wallows so enthusiastically in the dirt of everyday life and the dirty secrets of class envy" that it is possible to determine whether "the black bourgeoisie has been uprooted from its 'racial' tradition" and hides an inferiority complex. Ostensibly, his book is a mystery-thriller, replete with false leads, false endings, and true surprises. Within that structure, it is also a study of the black bourgeoisie, a nation within a nation, as real as it is imagined, who are as black as they are bourgeoisie: (16) Carter reveals the complexities of race.
III. TWO NATIONALISMS
This Review analyzes a census of The Emperor of Ocean Park. Like the plot, the racial themes defy easy summary, but because Misha's inner life is considerably more vigorous than his outward actions, the racial themes are also clear. There is scarcely a page that does not include an incident or comment related directly or indirectly to race, but few if any of these are acts of bigotry or even statements of prejudice. Once explicated, the story told by these incidents and comments is cynical, if not depressing.
None of Carter's characters is able to escape the effects of race, notwithstanding their efforts to do so. They are boxed in by race, even if they cannot see the lines marked out by race. All of the major characters, and most of the minor characters, are identified by race, ethnicity, and class. This does not make Carter's novel markedly different than other novels by, say, Scott Turow or John Grisham. The difference is not the racialization of characters or the implications of their identity. It is, rather, that Misha is self-conscious. He deserves to be commended, not condemned.
Yet in Carter's book there is no necessary correlation of race to class, politics, or culture. The black characters confound stereotypes. They are wealthy and poor, conservative and liberal, high- and lowbrow; the same is true of the white characters. Misha and his family are more wealthy than poor, more conservative than liberal, and more high-brow than low-brow. Among both black and white, there are individuals who are honorable and others who are not. The majority of the dangerous persons, however, are white.
This story...
|
