Palace Council

I had a few minutes to browse the library shelves all by myself last week. The Emperor of Ocean Park caught my eye and sounded vaguely familiar. Thumbing through it, I realized: I’ve read it. I remembered little of the plot, but I knew I’d thoroughly enjoyed it. Palace Council is one of two novels Yale University law professor Stephen L. Carter has written since that first one.

At just over 500 pages, its action spanning roughly twenty years from the early 50’s to 1975, Palace Council needs to sustain a level of energy and intensity to succeed. I read it as a murder mystery and political thriller in which fictional characters and events are woven into the fabric of history.

The afterword by the author suggests an alternative way of reading it. Despite its sweeping scope, Carter writes, it’s about the turbulent sixties. The main character is black author Eddie Wesley, who acts as a filter for the various political moods, the Vietnam War that served as a bridge from the optimism that preceded it to the cynicism that followed it, the push for civil rights, and the terror groups that rose up and pursued racial equality through violence.

Carter details various liberties he takes with sequencing the actual events of history in order to mesh with his plot. I have mixed feelings about it. He’s knowledgable and forthcoming about his own fictionalization of history, obviously credible as a historian. But at the same time, there’s something in me that thinks if you’re going to make arguments about the American character based on history, you should stick to the facts without so much self-indulgence.

What kind of arguments? One example would be Eddie Wesley’s claim that Nixon was not an aberration, but a fulfillment, of American ideals: self-interest, self-advancement without effort, ends justifying the means. All in all it’s a very skeptical, grim portrait of political and cultural life in this country. I’ll need to mull it for awhile. It certainly got me thinking, now that we have our first black president in office. I thought too about what it takes to create a public persona in today’s political culture, and to what extent the gap between the public persona and the actual person can be known.

Some of the characters are a bit implausible and/or irritating. The plot, too, is fantastical in some respects — a secret society, a missing sister-turned-radical-revolutionary, a love interest that goes in circles for 20 years, and a literature professor who’s never read Milton and seems to need a sleazy fellow professor to do all her research for her. (The research is to investigate various secret messages put forth by the secret society — a task that involves some discussion of Paradise Lost. If you like novels where textual study reveals past intrigues, A.S. Byatt’s Possession does it better.)

I’m not sure I would recommend this book, but considering that despite these complaints I never even thought of giving up on it, I guess it’s obvious that I find something very enjoyable and promising in Stephen Carter’s writing. I’ll probably pick up his remaining novel, New England White, the next time I’m in the mood for a tome.