The Gilded Ghetto

Law professor Talcott Garland is the privileged son of legendary attorney and Republican stalwart Oliver Garland. Well papered and connected, the Garlands are so established a family that when they summer at their home on Martha’s Vineyard, they try to avoid the Kennedys.

Members of the nation’s aristocracy, important people given over to public service and profitable private enterprise, they glide along the “Cambridge-Washington axis” through prestigious universities, law firms, investment banks and government posts. They seem fated to do stimulating work and lead purposeful, perfect lives.

But the Garlands are not what they appear. Much that is impressive is facade. Much of the noble public service reflects a secret need to compensate for private failings, and when Oliver dies under mysterious circumstances, Talcott is no longer able to deny what he has long feared: His family’s power and prestige have come at an awful price.

Stephen L. Carter’s “The Emperor of Ocean Park” is a remarkable debut novel. A member of the Yale Law School faculty for more than 20 years, Carter has written a number of scholarly works, none of which hinted at his gift for fiction. “The Emperor” is so rich in detail about a particular segment of American society that it only could have been written with unusual access to the subject and by someone with extraordinary powers of observation and expression. Carter has both.

The maxim that every great family fortune is built on a great crime fails to describe the Garlands. They are both victims and perpetrators of many crimes. When Talcott’s younger sister is killed by a hit-and-run driver, the autocratic Oliver compounds the tragedy by refusing to acknowledge embarrassing aspects of his daughter’s personal life or the family’s potential culpability in her demise. That obfuscation of justice protects the Garland name.

Oliver goes on to be appointed to the federal bench, but his stellar career is cut short when his nomination to the Supreme Court unravels in unseemly controversy.

For Talcott, the pressure to live up to his father’s enormous expectations and contradictions leaves him emotionally numb and professionally impotent. He remains married to an unfaithful, ambitious wife for the same reason he continues to slog along in an unsatisfying academic career: He is afraid to do anything else. Oliver’s death, however, jolts Talcott into action.

Now for the clincher: The Garlands are black. This might surprise you. That I mention it might offend you. That race is relevant and indeed fundamental to the book is undeniable.

“Ours is an old family, which, among people of our color, is a reference less to social than to legal status. Ancestors of ours were free and earning a living when members of the darker nation were in chains. Not all our ancestors were free, of course, but some, and the family does not dwell on the others: we have buried that bit of historical memory as effectively as the rest of America has buried the larger crime. And, like good Americans, we not only forgive the crime of chattel slavery but celebrate the criminals.”

In “The Emperor of Ocean Park,” Carter, who is also black, provides a rare look into the world of wealthy and established black families, their attitudes toward their history and their feelings about their fellow Americans. One is at a loss to name another book, movie, television program or other work of popular culture that has sought to convey, with such clarity, such depth of understanding or such critical analysis, the uniqueness of this experience.

Talcott Garland is revealed as the other Invisible Man, the successful, accepted black man whose pain is more existential than racial, though the two are never far apart. It is a pain not born of poverty or racism but rather survivor’s guilt over his achievement in avoiding the harshest impact of both.

This guilt, made acute as the Garlands rise to become part of the American elite, carries with it an especially heavy burden, one that smacks, to Talcott, of collaboration with the oppressors, self-hatred and tokenism. Because of his success, not in spite of it, he is isolated and uncomfortable in his own skin. He is a slave to the demands placed on him by being a Garland, deprived of even the succor of faith and shared suffering available to less successful blacks.

“I pass a gaggle of beggars, all members of the darker nation, to each of whom I give a dollar--paying guilt money, [my wife] calls this habit of mine. I wonder, briefly, how many of them are hustlers, but this is what my father used to call an ‘unworthy thought’: You are better than such ideas, he would preach to his children, with rare anger, commanding us to patrol our minds.”

Part mystery, part social commentary, Carter’s book is full of wry observation on matters ranging from the backbiting world of law school faculties to the nature of family squabbles and the social distinctions within the higher strata of black society. Some moments are more successful than others. Talcott’s wife and her pending judicial nomination too often seem a distraction. Carter’s reliance on chess, specifically Oliver’s obsession with it and Talcott’s application of its more obscure strategies to solve the mystery of his father’s death, seem obscure and forced.

But as with all serious literature, “The Emperor of Ocean Park” grounds its most important relationship in truths that transcend matters of race. As father and son, Oliver and Talcott are men of intellect and means, sharing all the competitive, repressed, contradictory and fierce emotions that that relationship suggests. Here, the color of skin is less significant than the American-ness that defines their aspirations and disappointments. Theirs is a relationship forged less in the welter of racism than in the mill of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.

Like John Cheever and Philip Roth, Carter confirms that above a certain tax bracket, race or religion does not make Americans crazy. Money, advancement, prestige and power do--and the need to own and possess in a society where nothing is free, not even ambition, not even a father’s love, and Carter is wise enough to define his book on these terms, above all others.

*

From ‘The Emperor of Ocean Park’

When my father finally died, he left the Redskins tickets to my brother, the house on Shepard Street to my sister, and the house on the Vineyard to me. ...

I was glad to have the Vineyard house, a tidy little Victorian on Ocean Park in the town of Oak Bluffs, with lots of frilly carpenter’s Gothic along the sagging porch and a lovely morning view of the white band shell set amidst a vast sea of smooth green grass and outlined against a vaster sea of bright blue water. My parents like to tell how they bought the house for a song back in the sixties, when Martha’s Vineyard, and the black middle-class colony that summers there, were still smart and secret. Lately, in my father’s oft-repeated view, the Vineyard had tumbled downhill, for it was crowded and noisy and, besides, they let everyone in now, by which he meant black people less well off than we. ...

And yet, amidst all the clamor, the Vineyard house is a small marvel. I loved it as a child and love it more now. Every room, every dark wooden stair, every window whispers its secret share of memories. ...

Ah, the Vineyard house! Addison was married in it, twice, once more or less successfully, and I smashed the leaded glass in the double front door, also twice, once more or less intentionally. Every summer of my youth we went there to live, because that is what one does with a summer home. Every winter my father griped about the upkeep and threatened to sell it, because that is what one does when happiness is a questionable investment. And when the cancer that pursued her for six years finally won, my mother died in it, in the smallest bedroom, with the nicest view of Nantucket Sound, because that is what one does if one can choose one’s end.

My father died at his desk. And, at first, only my sister and a few stoned callers to late-night radio shows believed he had been murdered.