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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"An obsession with pigmentation is even now the curse of our race," says the narrator of Stephen L. Carter's celebrated first novel, "The Emperor of Ocean Park," published in 2002. The line could serve as an epigraph for Carter's new, equally ambitious novel, "New England White" (Knopf; $26.95). Both books are, defiantly, loose baggy monsters, fusing such popular genres as the mystery, the thriller, the academic satire, the domestic family melodrama, and the seriocomic social novel; both are meditations on race by sharp-eyed citizens of the "darker nation" uneasily dwelling within the "paler nation"--in the fictitious New England university town of Elm Harbor and its neighboring village, Tyler's Landing, the "heart of whiteness." Tyler's Landing is a place where local residents are quick to declare that they have "nothing against the coloreds" but nonetheless keep a precise count of how many African-American families live in their community.
In "New England White," the new president of the university is the formidable former White House counsel Lemaster Carlyle, Barbados-born, a "tough little spark-plug of a man" who has been introduced in "The Emperor of Ocean Park" as a "nearly perfect politician" and a founder of a "forgotten organization called Liberals for Bush." (In the new novel, we learn that he was a college roommate--and is seemingly still a close friend--of the current incumbent of the Oval Office.) He and his wife, Julia, from whose perspective most...
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