The Emperor of Ocean Park

Blockbuster First Novel Surprises Modest Author Stephen Carter

By JULIA WELLS Gazette Senior Writer

He is a law professor first and a novelist second, but he is also a
lot of other things, in no particular order: a loving husband and
father, a deeply religious African-American, a constitutional scholar, a
conservative among liberals, a writer, a writer, a writer.

Stephen L. Carter - whose blockbuster new novel, The Emperor
of Ocean Park, is the most talked-about literary event of the summer
- has also been described as aloof.

But aloof is the wrong word. In truth there is a slightly guarded
quality about him - it's in his eyes, and it comes and goes.
First the guard is up. Then it comes down, and what tumbles out is pure
intellect and animated conversation punctuated by unexpected bits of
humor.

But by far the most unexpected thing about Stephen Carter is his
disarming modesty.

"I was in Toronto recently at a literary breakfast -
there were some real novelists there, as opposed to a law
professor-turned novelist," he exclaims over breakfast at Linda
Jean's in Oak Bluffs on Wednesday morning.

The interview begins with a story about a bicycle.

"What I know is that the first time I came here I didn't
know how to ride a bicycle," Mr. Carter says. It turns out that
his first summer on the Vineyard was when he was a young child -
but he can't remember the year, he just remembers that the
children in his family had been given bicycles that summer. "Those
were the days when bicycles were big and they came and you had to
assemble them," he says. "We assembled them at home and then
we disassembled them to ship them to the Vineyard. They arrived with
parts missing - a lot of parts missing." As a result, young
Stephen Carter didn't learn to ride a bike on the Vineyard that
summer.

Now, at age 47, Mr. Carter is the William Nelson Cromwell professor
of law at Yale University. The Emperor of Ocean Park is his first novel,
a legal thriller about upper class African-Americans. The book is
already the buzz of the summer. Publisher Alfred Knopf paid Mr. Carter
an astonishing $4.2 million for the book, along with a second, still
unwritten novel.

Widely praised by reviewers, The Emperor of Ocean Park already has
rocketed to the number three spot on The New York Times best seller
list.

No one is more astonished than Mr. Carter.

"It's all a little bewildering. I didn't sit down
and say, ‘This will be a commercial success.' I sat there
and said, ‘Will this ever get published? Will this ever get
finished?' I just wanted to write a story that was a good read.
This has been pretty overwhelming - that's why I need a
vacation," he says.

Mr. Carter has been on tour with the book since late May, and he
will go on tour again after he leaves the Vineyard next week. Even his
vacation includes book events. Tonight at the Union Chapel in Oak
Bluffs, the Bunch of Grapes will sponsor a book signing and reading. On
Sunday evening he will sign books at the Cousen Rose Gallery in Oak
Bluffs.

"I've written several nonfiction books, but nobody has
asked me to do an event on the Vineyard before," he says, a tiny
glint of humor in his eye.

Narrated by Talcott Garland, a black law professor at a university
much like Yale, The Emperor of Ocean Park is an elegantly written,
meticulously crafted murder mystery and a story of a family. The setting
for the book is the family summer home on Ocean Park in Oak Bluffs. Mr.
Carter's treatment of the Vineyard is gentle and sensitive -
he gets it right.

As an adult, Mr. Carter began coming to the Vineyard in 1987 and has
vacationed nearly every summer since with his wife and two children.
They always rent, always in Oak Bluffs, not always on Ocean Park,
although they have rented there.

His solemn advice: "Never rent a house without a rocking
chair; never rent a house without a porch; never rent a house without a
view."

About the Vineyard, he says: "I really love the place, and I
loved it as a child. Here is how I mark it off - in the late 1980s
you could still go to the Flying Horses and ride the carousel twice in a
row. I think it got too crowded in the 1990s; I know a lot of people say
that it was because of Clinton, and I don't really have an opinion
about that. But I know that it got too crowded."

In the book, Talcott Garland says:

"The Island is neither as tidy nor as friendly as it once was.
And it is all so sudden, so sudden. Blink once and a dusty road where
you used to play tag is paved and clogged with traffic. Blink twice and
the vacant lot where you had your ball games has a gigantic house on it.
Blink again and the vast, dreamy beaches of your youth have lost half or
more of their sand to the sea. Blink a fourth time and the pharmacy
where your mother used to buy Coriciden when you were sick is a
boutique. . . . So I look around and try to tell myself that little,
after all, has really changed. And if a few more candy wrappers than I
remember from my youth seem to be blowing along the streets, I like to
think it is only because the new people have not yet learned how to love
an island - not because they do not care."

Mr. Carter says the passage reflects his own outlook.
"That's my optimism, you see, because I am still optimistic
about the Island. I think a lot of resorts go through these periods of
extreme popularity, and I think possibly the Vineyard needs to go into a
trough for awhile. People come here now because it is popular, and not
because they love it. I do like to think that in the future the Vineyard
will be a little - softer," he says.

Ask him about his writing, his books, his academic interests, and he
is talkative, fluent, expressive. Ask him to tell his own story and he
demurs.

"Dull," he says, reciting a hasty resume: He was born in
Washington, D.C., later moved to Harlem ("It was a different kind
of Harlem; I didn't grow up in poverty," he says), then his
high school years were spent in Ithaca, N.Y., where his father taught at
Cornell University. He went to Stanford and later Yale Law School, where
he met his wife, Enola Aird. They have two children: Leah, 16, and
Andrew, 14. He wears his adoration for his family on his sleeve.
"We always thought of ourselves as a foursome, not a
twosome," he says.

He wrote The Emperor of Ocean Park late at night over a period of
many months. "I was writing it around other things," he
says. "I didn't want to slack my family and I didn't
want to slack my day job, which was my teaching."

The book has attracted much comment because of its unusual
perspective, but Mr. Carter says the social commentary was not so
deliberate. "The most important thing to me about the book is
it's a story about family and relationships, parent, child, the
nature of love, the nature of family. I didn't write it to send a
message - those themes emerged as a kind of consequence of the
characters and who they became," he says.

The book came together in pieces over a period of years. He had most
of the characters early on, but not the story. Talcott was the
exception.

Once he had Talcott, Mr. Carter made the decision - the story
would be written in the first person and it would be a mystery.
"Then I knew where I was going," he says, wryly quoting from
Ernest Hemingway about first-person writing: "Hemingway said any
fool could write a novel in the first person, but I think Hemingway must
have meant you have to be a fool to write a first-person novel."

He admits he is a perfectionist. "It slows me," he says.
But he also says he sees writing as serious work. "I think it was
the poet Nikki Giovanni who said, ‘If you have to be in the mood
to write poetry, then you'll never be a poet.' Writing to me
is always fun, but it is also something that is very, very hard.
It's a job and you have to have the discipline for it. People ask
me, when did you know you were a real writer, and what I tell them is
you know you're a real writer when you say, ‘I can't
go out tonight because I have to write.' "

He also completed a nonfiction book while he was working on The
Emperor of Ocean Park. His nonfiction work is both acclaimed and
controversial, and includes an array of subjects from affirmative action
to civility to integrity.

What does Mr. Carter, the law professor turned novelist, read?

"I always read fiction on the Vineyard," he smiles.
"Now I am reading Raymond Chandler - what a waste of life to
never have read Raymond Chandler!"

He says his book bag also contains Ian MacEwan's Amsterdam and
historian Norman Cantor's In The Wake of the Plague.

What doesn't he read? His own reviews.

"I just don't read them, except for The New York Times.
What is the point? My wife reads them. Wasn't it Martin Amis who
said, ‘Don't read your reviews, measure them.' "

The film rights to the book have also been snapped up, but Mr.
Carter says he will have little involvement in the movie. For one thing,
he says it is too difficult to make the jump to deciding which actors
should play the parts of the characters in the book. "My
characters are real to me; they have faces; they have lives," he
says. "Novelists who decide they know how to make a film -
that's hubris. I hardly know how to write a novel. I enjoy film as
a consumer."

Mr. Carter says the African-American community on the Vineyard is a
strong attraction for him and his family. He notes that black
professionals often work in places that are predominantly white, and a
vacation community with other blacks has obvious appeal.
"It's nice to be able to go to a place for a vacation where
there are a lot of other blacks, and clearly Oak Bluffs is such a
community. That's not a knock on white people, it is a love of
black people," he says.

He has never been active in the summer social scene. "We go to
the beach, watch sunsets, have picnics at Menemsha, sit on the porch,
drink lemonade and read," he says.

He also talks about what he calls the integration of the Vineyard.

"There are plenty of shopping malls on the mainland where if
you go and are black, you will be treated with suspicion. There is no
place on Martha's Vineyard where a black is treated with
suspicion. . . . This is an Island where it is possible to not worry
about race. I really like it. There are residential patterns -
certainly Oak Bluffs has more black people and Edgartown and Chilmark
have more white people. But I see that as something that's a
reflection of the reason black people like to come here in the first
place. I have no idea if there are problems in the social setting
because I don't go to parties. But my sense is that there is more
division along class lines than along racial lines."

An hour and a half slips away, and the conversation goes on. He
agrees to a short walk in Ocean Park. A final question is directed at
the law professor and constitutional scholar on the day before the
Fourth of July. What are his thoughts about America?

He recalls his daughter's nickname for him. "She
describes me as a patrio-idealist. I think America right now is trying
to find a comfortable way to balance the notion of individualism with
the notion of obligation. In the 1950s Americans went overboard on
obligation and in the 1990s they went overboard on individualism. . . .
And maybe now the lesson of Sept. 11 will be to restore some of that
balance," he says.

"I think we've got to believe in people . . . and we
have to start to take care of each other."