‘Palace Council’ aspires, conspires

Palace Council

A Novel

Stephen L. Carter

Alfred A. Knopf: 518 pp., $26.95

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It’s NO surprise that in “Palace Council,” the third of Stephen L. Carter’s fables about black America’s upper crust, success depends not on what you know but whom. With the right connections -- along with the right bloodlines and education -- a young man has a good chance of going places. The ambitious fellow at the center of this sprawling and occasionally confusing novel has a comparatively modest family background but education and moxie to spare. Edward Wesley Jr., late of Amherst and Brown, “could quote Shakespeare and Dante by the yard, but also Douglass and Du Bois. He could tease. He could charm. He could flatter.” So it’s almost to be expected when he progresses from a “man on the rise” to an acclaimed novelist and journalist who wins two National Book Awards before turning 40 (the latest for his novel “Pale Imitation”).

But, as Billy Dee Williams forcefully declares in that camp classic “Mahogany,” success is nothing without having someone you love to share it with. Eddie means to share his laurels with his one true love, Aurelia Treene, or with no one at all. Aurie, who made a memorable appearance as a perceptive septuagenarian in Carter’s last novel, “New England White,” is first seen here as a lovely twentysomething recently arrived in Harlem. A talented writer who eventually earns a PhD, Aurie is more concerned with landing a rich M-A-N -- a prerequisite for the high society to which she aspires. She spurns Eddie while he is still poor and obscure, instead marrying Kevin Garland, son of a Wall Street player who is “possibly the wealthiest Negro in the United States.”

The only other woman with a claim to Eddie’s affections is his younger sister Junie, the “only gentle member of a tough, frosty family.” Shortly after graduating from Harvard Law School, Junie disappears while traveling cross-country with a friend. Carter hangs his plot on Eddie’s obsessive search for his beloved sister, a quest that will eventually span two decades and wind through various danger zones and spy dens, including the White House. Meanwhile, Aurie’s brooding, mysterious husband leaves home for weeks at a time, returning periodically to mutter cryptically about a “mess” that Phil Castle, a dead associate, has left behind. I should mention that Castle’s corpse, sprawled in a Harlem gutter, had been found by none other than Eddie Wesley.

It turns out these two developments are connected, and in case you don’t deduce that yourself, Carter helpfully tells us: “And so the two mysteries, the murder of Phil Castle and the disappearance of June Cranch Wesley, were linked.” This tendency to tell rather than show hinders his increasingly complicated novel. The story unfolds from 1952 to 1975, and the twists, turns and double-crosses take place in a number of settings, including Harlem, Washington and parts of Africa and Southeast Asia. All the globe-trotting and time-passing enable Eddie and Aurie, who eventually patch up their differences and form a team, to function as improbable eyewitnesses to history.

Eddie, for example, has private audiences with presidents Kennedy and Nixon, trades favors with Joseph P. Kennedy, pals around with Langston Hughes and battles wits with J. Edgar Hoover. Aurie does her part as well, partying with everyone from Harry Belafonte to Lena Horne and Sugar Ray Robinson.

But Carter seems to fear that readers won’t be able to keep up with the many events and personalities crammed into his pages, hence his occasionally pointing out clues and facts of history that are best left to the reader’s discernment. Such as: “At this time, it was still difficult for a Negro to count on hotel accommodations.” “At this time in America’s history, the network of interstate highways was far from complete.” These are intrusions that slow the narrative and may lead readers to listen for Walter Cronkite solemnly intoning, “It’s August, 1958, and you were there.”

Our man Eddie is always there. Part James Baldwin, part Graham Greene and part Zelig, his knack for turning up at revelatory intervals challenges our willingness to believe.

Eddie’s presence at Camp David, alone with Nixon as he ponders leaving office in the wake of Watergate, is one such challenging moment, albeit one that allows Carter to connect his plot to a strand introduced in his first novel, “The Emperor of Ocean Park.”

In that mystery, Oliver Garland, an appeals court judge (and cousin of Aurie’s husband), blames Nixon’s resignation on “a cabal of vengeful liberals” and “the ruthless forces of the left.” It turns out that the judge’s conspiracy theory was not far off the mark. In “Palace Council,” the left is not so much merciless as self-indulgent and disorganized. But, in Carter’s telling, Nixon’s hand was indeed forced by a cabal, a group that will be familiar to readers of “New England White.”

The conspirators in that book belonged to the Empyreals, a Harlem club composed of “400 colored gentlemen of quality.” Some Empyreals are involved in the maneuverings Eddie uncovers, but this time the schemes involve a far more exclusive group. Eight Empyreals have joined with 12 white men to form the Palace Council.

Having “no patience with democracy,” the council has launched a covert campaign to build a better America by taking it over, even if it requires generations to implement.

Taking their name and MO from Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” council members launch viral social networks long before the dawn of the World Wide Web. The host of the first gathering, convened in 1952, “knew people, and the kind of people he knew, knew other people.” Guilt-by-association occurs throughout the novel. The FBI’s Hoover tells Eddie that he had “a call from somebody who had a call from somebody who had a call from somebody.” Eddie later tells Joe Kennedy: “They say you have connections where others have no idea that it is possible to have connections.” Not to be topped, Eddie’s billionaire pal with leftist leanings says, “I know people who know people.”

Regular readers of Carter’s fiction will no doubt feel that they know a few people too. Members of the Veazies, Garlands, Bings and other royal clans of what Carter terms “the darker nation” populate each novel as the author creates a universe in which a notion or person introduced early on just may pop up again in a subsequent book. Carter’s universe is most compelling when he aims at the targets with which he apparently is most comfortable, black high society and academia -- and where his slings and arrows travel with admirable sureness. That this latest fails to satisfy as much as his previous offerings is by no means a reason for readers to abandon his ambitious project. “Palace Council” contains tantalizing hints of conspiracies to come, and it’s plenty entertaining to wonder who might emerge from this novel to figure prominently in his next.

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Jabari Asim is editor in chief of the Crisis magazine and the author of “The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why.”