But in a novel this ambitious, great characters have to be more than just the sum of their ideas. Supreme Court became a public scandal), Talcott Garland, an African American law professor at an Ivy League university, is left to unravel the. Carter's engaging debut novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park.After the funeral of his powerful father (a federal judge whose nomination to the U.S. The sparring partners he creates are smart, slippery, and unpredictable, as long as they’re talking. A complex, smart mystery filled with intrigue, drama, and more than a little danger awaits in Stephen L. In a single entertaining paragraph, Carter can jump from a devastating portrayal of Garland’s neocon father, who pandered to ”Rightpacs” by telling them that ”the future of conservatism is black America!” to a brutal takedown of that idea, to a brutal takedown of people who would commit that takedown. He’s so proudly unclassifiable that, even masked as fiction, his taste for the contrarian - one character is an anti-choice lesbian feminist, another belongs to Liberals for Bush - threatens to become an ideology of its own. Carter himself is a virtuecrat (though more along the lines of Joe Lieberman than of Bill Bennett), a self-conscious nonideologue who has written pious treatises called ”Integrity” and ”Civility,” whose views on affirmative action and religion in public life have endeared him to some conservatives while flummoxing others who correctly note all of the positions he doesn’t share with them.

It doesn’t take a close reading of ”Emperor” to discern that Garland seems most engaged when he’s dealing with the parry and thrust of debate, not unlike his creator. Emperor of Ocean Park is a suspenseful take on Stephen L Carter’s best-selling novel. Both novels - the mystery and the panorama - are more compelling for the way they repackage the sociocultural propositions their author has already retailed in a considerable body of nonfiction.

The emperor of ocean park