Experience The Emperor Of Ocean Park Authored By Stephen L. Carter Provided As Text

Emperor of Ocean Park, which dedicates quite a number of pages to the game of chess its narrator loves, is itself a sort of chess match.
Author Carter runs multiple sophisticated plots concurrently through the story, making Emperor a novel of academia, of racial and professional politics here often identically aimed, a straightup legal thriller, and a story of an already disintegrating family coping with the loss of its domineering patriarch all of which somehow meld into a coherent and satisfying finale.
But Carter's great creation is Talcott Garland, a persona whose intelligence and intellectual accomplishment combine with an initial innocence, even naivete, about the turpitude he discovers on all fronts.
Talcott's ability to remain a character true to his own strictly defined moral standards within a community of

nefarious, if wellcrafted, personalities carry the novel to some of its best epiphanies and most memorable asides.
Without Talcott, there simply wouldnt be a novel, and for a fiction that can ask for perhaps more than the typical amount of patience of its readers, he is quite literally the center of gravity around which the entire work, and its fictive world, revolve.

Loved this book!! The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L, Carter. is a quite compelling if not evenly flowing or artistic read, It's an ambitious book that works on many different levels, As a first time novelist, Carter should have stuck to one or two, but in the end you are glad that he didn't.
returnreturnAs a thriller, it bites you slooowly, I get the feeling that if Carter weren't so interested in putting us in his protagonist's stubborn and provincial shoes, we might figure out exactly what is going to happen next.
Of course you cannot guess because the twists and surprises go for almostpages, The thriller could have been shortened by half, But if we were to do that, we would have had to make the protagonist less harried and more intrigued.
returnreturnTalcott Garland is not intrigued, he is haunted by being the scion of a legendary judge and patriarch who has set in motion wrecking ball from the grave aimed directly at his upper middleclass life.
Carter is not content to trace the trajectory of this wrecking ball as it crashes through the many windows and wall of Garland's complicated life no that would be a thriller.
Rather he draws out the contemplations of a man who may by his actions and reactions to the threats of this wrecking ball, may be going insane, or who may be becoming a hero.
And since Talcott Garland is a member of the darker nation, Carter has reinscribed a new class of Negroes into the duBoisian dilemma of dual consciousness.
What's so thrilling about thatreturnreturnWhat's thrilling about it is that this is certainly what Carter must know he is doing.
And as we like to say in the black upper middle class, 'this sets us backyears'.
But that's just one angle on this story and I'll leave it at that, returnreturnCarter also injects a healthy dose of his most potent moralizing into the conscience of Talcott Garland who is forever trying to keep his wits and perspective about him.
While he is surrounded by a whirlwind of manipulators and players, he tries desperately to play it straight.
Talcott Garland has no guile to rely upon which gives him the courage to fight, Yet his abiding faith in his ability to recover the love of his cheating wife alone and finally serve honorably as head of his family pushes him to seek answers to the questions he'd rather not know.
Garland comes armed with a host of virtues sown deeply in the ways and means of the talented tenth, but they are supplied not inherently but through his extended family.
Each of a dozen family members and friends has a slice of those virtues and each imparts a bit of strength or knowledge upon poor Talcott as he valiantly struggles to unlock the mystery.
returnreturnFurthermore as a story of the times, of the moral mishmash of career ambitions in academia and in Washington, it's a marvelous book that continues his nonfiction scolding by other means.
returnreturnWhat absolutely floored me was the patience evidenced in the setting of traps by certain characters there's not much you hear about anything so subtle in any fictional intrigue which has such a long horizon.
Instead you hear the reverse, that mistakes made are long hid and only newly discovered by the hounding media or political opposition but that once discovered they are immediately brought to bear.
returnreturnFurther, I think Carter does an admirable job of bringing race in and out of focus naturally as the story progresses, which is how it happens in life.
returnreturnIt's a very ambitious book and quite a tall order for any writer, As an artist he's not quite up to the task, Although there are a number of gems in the form of pagelong paragraphs you can just tell couldn't be dickered with, most of the writing is just writing.
His habit of dropping annoying little bomblets of discovery at the very end of his chapters serves the purpose of helping keep parts of Talcott's recognition obscured to the reader, but gets tiresome.
But the endingpages makes up for it, given Talcott's final machinations and collaborations, returnreturnI think the book is a bit chaptery, and it comes as no surprise that he createdto coincide with the number of squares on a chessboard, but I would have liked Talcott to be a lot more chesswise in his thinking.
Even having him think "protect the queen" would have been better, Also I think Talcott needed to be frayed a lot more, It would have drawn me in deeper, One never gets the feeling that Talcott's ruination would evoke in him the ugly side of losing one's status, I didn't sense his contempt for his potential lowerclass neighbors, or his sense of how he would adapt.
Talcott's mushy selfesteem is not a compelling place for a reader, but it does serve the purposes of Carter's moral lecture.
. . returnreturnCarter's imagery of Martha's Vineyard is not so descriptive so much as evocative for those who already have some emotional resonance with the place.
But I found myself riding along on the ferry, gazing of the cliffs at Gay Head and lazily walking the Circuit along with him.
returnreturnThe book is fascinating and bears up under different layers of scrutiny, That is what makes it good, and a must read for those of us who have shared, at various points in our life, the muddled consciousness of Talcott Garland.
This was a good story but could have been a lot shorter, . . too descriptive throughout. I found myself thinking, "Move on! I got it, ". But, the story is worth the read, Great bookintricate, well written and entertaining, This book was fantastic, and I'm sorry it took me so long to get to it.
Although sixteen years later is better than never, I wish that I had grabbed this book when everyone else in the world did when it was published.
I remember. This book stayed on the bestseller lists for several weeks, Stephen Carter's name was on everyone's lips except mine, Why the disinterest What took me so long The usual reason: I had my nose stuck in an old, dusty, outofprint novel the kind I prefer, so I missed all the excitement.
I never follow trends. Oh well, better late than never,

I don't need to break this book down, Everyone knows what it's about, I only want to mention this The Emperor of Ocean Park's perfect multiracial group of wealthy and selfabsorbed characters intelligent, but cuckholded professor Tal, his cheatingharpy lawyer wife Kimmer, mysterious and scary Jack Ziegler, alwayspregnant socialite Mariah, gossipy dean Dear Dana, usedup druggie Cousin Sally and the memory of the newlydead Judge Oliver Garland, the icy setting New England Martha's Vineyard, Washington D.
C. , a fictional Ivy League college, a great theme the murder thriller solved as a chess problem, and the clever talks chess move talks, dinner party talks about God and faith, and Ivy League talks about the legal system.
The Emperor was my kind of thriller whenever I read thrillers: literary, moody, cerebral chess rules, Buber, Tort law!, and longpages it was the kind of suspense I could sink my teeth into for long winter days.
. .

This book was pure heaven, Better late than never. The fact that this book explores university politics featuring east coast black uppermiddle class characters made it stand out from the pack, but once you get over this facet which I did pretty quickly, what you're left with is a well written and fairly intriguing mystery, more memorable than some I've read, less so than others.
I suppose a book like this one is an antidote to the urban/hip hop/gangsta/etc.
genre of "literature", not so much because it features black characters who are articulate, educated and well to do, but because it was written by someone who fits this description.
Ultimately I could care less if the narrator of a novel I'm reading is a college professor or a drug dealing pimp.
I only care that the story is absorbing and the characters ring true, and this book did a decent if not quite extraordinary job of accomplishing that feat.
Intricate, superbly written, often scathingly funny a brilliantly crafted tapestry of ambition, family secrets, murder, integrity tested, and justice has gone terribly wrong.


An extraordinary fiction debut: a large, stirring novel of suspense that is, at the same time, a work of brilliantly astute social observation.
The Emperor of Ocean Park is set in two privileged worlds: the upper crust African American society of the eastern seaboardold families who summer on Martha's Vineyardand the inner circle of an Ivy League law school.
It tells the story of a complex family with a single, seductive link to the shadowlands of crime.


The Emperor of the title, Judge Oliver Garland, has just died, suddenly, A brilliant legal mind, conservative and famously controversial, Judge Garland made more enemies than friends, Many years before, he'd earned a judge's highest prize: a Supreme Court nomination, But in a scene of bitter humiliation, televised across the country, his nomination collapsed in scandal.
The humbling defeat became a private agony, one from which he never recovered,

But now the Judge's death raises, even more, questionsand it seems to be leading to a second, even more, terrible scandal.
Could Oliver Garland have been murdered He has left a strange message for his son Talcott, a professor of law at a great university, entrusting him with "the arrangements"a mysterious puzzle that only Tal can unlock, and only by unearthing the ambiguities of his father's past.
When another man is found dead, and then another, Talcottwry, straightarrow, almost too selfaware to be a man of actionmust risk his career, his marriage, and even his life, following the clues his father left him.


Intricate, superbly written, often scathingly funny, The Emperor of Ocean Park is a triumphant work of fiction, packed with character and incidenta brilliantly crafted tapestry of ambition, family secrets, murder, integrity tested, and justice has gone terribly wrong.
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