Mystery, Murder & 'Polite Racism'
Lynn Bonney
Saturday, December 8, 2007
“On Friday the cat disappeared, the White House phoned, and Jeannie’s fever — said the sitter when Julia called from the echoing marble lobby of Lombard Hall, where she and her husband were feting shadowy alumni, one or two facing indictment, whose only virtue was piles of money — hit 103. After that, things got worser faster, as her grandmother used to say ... .”
Stephen L. Carter gets off to a quick start in “New England White,” his follow-up to “The Emperor of Ocean Park,” which enjoyed wide critical and popular success several years ago. The opening words of Part 1 of the novel, however, follow a scene-setting prologue that introduces the reader to a picturesque college town where racism, polite but persistent, lies below the attractive surface.
Carter reintroduces Lemaster and Julia Carlyle, college president and divinity-school dean, reconfigured characters from “The Emperor of Ocean Park.” As in the previous novel, “New England White” is a sociological study that evolves from a mystery, as Lemaster and Julia, taking a shortcut home from the alumni gathering, skid off a snowy road and discover the body of Kellen Zant, a university professor and Julia’s former lover.
The success of Carter’s first novel came, in part, because it took readers into the world of America’s black upper middle class, a world that many — black as well as white — did not realize existed. He writes, “Of the secrets of their exclusive fraternities and sororities, outsiders knew far less than they thought they did.” This is a world of old money, of education, where family names matter and secrets run deep. The elites of the “darker nation” and the “paler nation” are different universes, not truly parallel, but seldom intersecting.
Carter pursues his study through the unfolding mystery: Who killed Kellen Zant? His relationship with Julia ended before her marriage, but the link between their lives was never truly severed. Julia soon finds herself approached by strangers who want to know about the “surplus” Kellen is supposed to have left to her.
Surplus, in this usage, means the difference between the value of a good to an individual and the price paid for it. She will learn that secrets — and lives — have different values to different people, and to different races.
Kellen’s clues lead Julia to a range of times, places and people, as she begins to suspect that her troubled oldest daughter may be involved in Kellen’s death. Both were interested in another murder, also unsolved, from 30 years ago that seems to involve Lemaster, his black men’s club and his college friends, the Four Horsemen or the Fabulous Four.
In addition to Lemaster, the four included Jock Hillman, deceased, and Max Whisted, a U.S. senator preparing an attempt to defeat the fourth member, Scrunchy, the U.S. president, in his bid for re-election. The three others, all white, broke tradition to invite a black student into their midst in college, and the ripples of that decision are making themselves felt.
Their complex history is the heart of a mystery and the heart of race relations, as Carter interprets them in a captivating, readable and impressive novel.
F Emporia Public Library staff and volunteers write “On the Shelf.”