FROM RACE TO CHASE.(Yale Law School Professor Stephen Carter)

When Stephen Carter, who is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor at Yale Law School, was in eighth grade, in 1967, his history teacher, Mrs. Ahlquist, made a comment that helped to change his life. "She said, 'You're pretty smart,' " Carter told me recently. "I had never thought of myself that way before. I had always been an ordinary student, and I had not stood out in class, academically."

Carter is black; the public junior high school he attended, in Washington, D.C., was predominantly white. When he entered the school, in seventh grade, his mother was told that he would not be able to continue taking Spanish, because the foreign-language program was reserved for students from a different elementary school. "That particular elementary school happened to be white, while the one I had attended happened to be black," Carter said. Like the other black students, he was given vocational training instead: woodshop, print shop, typing. "There's nothing wrong with shop," he went on, "and typing has been a useful skill for me. But those were the only possibilities." The following year, however, Carter was allowed to take Latin and algebra, and suddenly he began to excel. Along with Mrs. Ahlquist, he began to believe that he might be pretty smart.

Academic achievement brought Carter both satisfaction and frustration. A couple of years later, at the mostly white high school he attended, in Ithaca, New York, he was usually the only black student in the courses he took, and that fact alone made his teachers and classmates treat him as exceptional: even his ordinary efforts won him a sort of astonished admiration. But Carter yearned to be accepted as something more than the school's "best black." He worked harder still, and he made sure that his good grades and high test scores were not a secret. "Eighth grade through twelfth grade, I was pretty unbearable," he told me. He went on to Stanford, where he majored in history and served as the managing editor of the student newspaper, and then to Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for both a federal appeals-court judge and the United States Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He has taught at Yale since 1982.

At Yale, Carter was exceptional from the start. After just three years on the faculty, he became the school's first tenured black professor. He has written seven very readable nonfiction books on a variety of legal, political, social, moral, and religious themes, and those books have given him a popular following that extends far beyond New Haven. His religious views, especially, have distinguished him from his colleagues: his personal faith, which can be generally characterized as evangelical Christianity, is of a variety not often found within the faculties of large universities, particularly in the Northeast. He contributes a regular column to Christianity Today; recently, his topic was the "unintentional biblical message" of the movie "A Beautiful Mind."

On June 2nd, Carter is distinguishing himself yet again: Knopf is publishing his first novel, "The Emperor of Ocean Park." Carter's agent, Lynn Nesbit, submitted the manuscript to about eight publishers a little more than a year ago. Within days, she received three preemptive offers--big bids that were meant to tempt her into ending the auction early. Knopf eventually prevailed, with an offer of four million dollars for this novel and one more (which Carter is writing now). The deal made Carter one of the highest-paid novice fiction writers ever--an achievement that prompted a colleague to refer to him, privately and with mild derision, as "Stephen Carter, Superstar."

Carter's emergence as a popular novelist has surprised people who knew him only as a professor and a serious scholar. As Carter sees things, though, his new book fits right in. He has dreamed of being a published novelist since he was a young boy, when he would fill spiral notebooks with science-fiction stories. And he has managed to give the book-- which is both a conventional thriller and an account of a large, complicated, prosperous black family--a number of very Carter-like touches. For example, the narrator manages, between cliffhangers, to slip in a few pointed observations on African-American culture, ...