PALACE COUNCIL - Stephen Carter - Fiction

Stephen Carter writes wide-ranging historico-political thrillers that are widely enjoyed by the African-American community, who factor prominently in his work. At least, that's what the librarian told me when I checked out PALACE COUNCIL, after having read NEW ENGLAND WHITE a few years ago. (PALACE COUNCIL is something of a sequel, and both follow on the tail of THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK.) All of his novels draw characters from the same pool of elite Harlem figures, people from a community with the same class gradations and ruling families as Early Modern France. At times, Carter seems to be poking fun at these people, and their concerns for what the important people in their society would think of them, and at times not. Carter also sets up his main characters as novelists, one early in life and one later, and throws out marks of literary prestige as though they meant as much as the Légion d'honneur--which in the world he has created, they may. It's hard to tell if Carter's positioning of his main character is due to the traditional novelist's blindness, which sees a writer as the most interesting occupation for any character, or if he is instead also poking fun at himself, at the notion that an author would be caught up in the kind of overblown, rip-roaring plots that embroil Eddie.

There is a lot of disbelief to be suspended in this five-hundred-plus page account of a national conspiracy that spans decades, involves Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Langston Hughes, and other notable political and cultural figures, and draws upon men from the upper echelons of white and black society to come together in a plot, couched in Satanic terms, to overthrow the government peacably and secretively, installing a President sympathetic to the needs of the African-American community. It was interesting to read this novel after watching the campaign and election of Barack Obama, and as the novel was published in 2008, Carter must have had some wind of events that might come. But of course, the idea of political machinations or an African-American president are not the less credible events of this story. From a strictly realistic standpoint, the cloak-and-dagger antics of the FBI and CIA agents who pursue Eddie, and the cabal of men who form the secret society based on obscure literary references to passages of Milton and Lawrence, start out terrifying and end up tedious--the last confrontation between Eddie and his pursuer, on a bridge in Ithaca overlooking a gorge, just sputters out, using up all of its possible tactics of scare and suspense to leave me waiting impatiently for the bad man to leave, having yet again succeeded in 'warning' Eddie without leaving a scratch on him.

I also have to say that the idea of a man waiting fourteen years to reclaim the woman he loves--waiting through her husband and two children, through her indecision over the direction of her life, over whether she has feelings for Eddie at all, over whether she can marry him, and, ultimately, over whether she can continue to please her society friends if she seemingly justifies all the rumors--is ludicrous. Romantic, yes, but entirely unbelievable. And the ending--which gives some of the reasons for Aurelia's hesitations--is even less believable, because it ruins the entire premise of the novel, the premise that, despite their different choices in marriage, career, and friendship, they are involved in the same hunt, the same mystery, the same desire to answer the same questions. And reader, in the last twenty pages we discover that they are not. That Aurelia has as good as led Eddie on for the past twenty years. I don't believe it, and I don't understand it--Aurelia calling in favors from Nixon, writing to Eddie with breathless concern over his trip to Vietnam, attending his father's funeral, all while hiding from Eddie what he most wants to know? Either Aurelia is hopelessly cruel, or hopelessly misguided, and given that the reader is meant to root for romance between the two throughout the entire tortured plot, I can't really hope for either.

The bright spots in this novel are the finely written caricatures of known politicos--Nixon, Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover--who entertain and shock, and offer an idea of how fun it must be to have the confidence as a writer to not only rejigger history, but to take on the voice and mannerisms of some of American history's most infamous players. Writing dialogue for Nixon! It sounds so audaciously fun, and looks so on the page. Really, that's the most we want out of historical fiction, isn't it? Because however true or false the overlying mystery/thriller plot seems, the joy of writing a novel that spans time from the 1930s to the 1980s is being able to throw your own masks over people who you knew only through the reporting of others--being able to take a picture from the newspaper and animate the black-and-white man inside it, pulling the strings, reanimating the flat characters of our collective social unconscious. Here, Carter does a bang-up job.