Soured on ‘Ocean Park’

Stephen Carter’s “The Emperor of Ocean Park” is novel many critics and readers alike are heralding as brilliant, groundbreaking fiction and will surely turn up on all of those Top Ten lists for literature at the end of 2002. While my own Boothian “artifice” prevents me from ever raising the following examination above the level of mere educated opinion, I would like to point out why “The Emperor of Ocean Park” is not groundbreaking or at all brilliant, but in fact fully embodies almost all that’s wrong with the novel today. Stephen Carter is a very popular professor at Yale, and no doubt an intelligent man, so why is it that he too cannot decide if his novel is to be a social critique, a philosophical discourse or just a damn good mystery? Why is he content leaving “The Emperor of Ocean Park” not with a satisfying resolution, but, after a behemoth 654 pages of redundancy, simply the lump sum of a list of ideas? I draw attention to this novel not because it is by any means a weak work of fiction (quite the opposite is true), but more because it has been embraced as brilliant, and to be perfectly honest, the bar should be set higher than this. “The Emperor of Ocean Park” is first, so ambitious a novel, and second, so incredibly overrated that it is such a notable failure. “Emperor” centers on a black law professor named Talcott Garland, whom upon investigating his father’s death, discovers an intricate web of backstabbing, shady people from the past and mysterious goings-on in a world of deception.

Structurally, “Emperor” is a linear mystery: clues unfold, plot twists are enjoyably scattered, and characters are well written with good, sometimes even witty and convincing, dialogue. But somehow all of this travels like a moving caravan and arrives at what Carter hopes will be a commentary on the state of many institutions in American society, everything from the controversial subject of tenure to the incompetence of police.

There are so many ideas battling to come to the fore that the reader loses focus and suddenly realizes that he isn’t even halfway through a 654-page monster that is only going to get murkier. “Emperor” is a coagulate of safe, tried-and-true ideas (do we really need to examine the disintegrating modern American marriage again?), and a few notes of social commentary. But here is a work that begs to be streamlined by about 200 pages, requires intense editing to avoid droning redundancy, and is essentially little more than bits of dialogue strung together. Carter’s own discourse is also plagued by digression; in not one chapter of “Emperor” does he truly go from beginning to end without losing focus at least once along the way. Why is it that a book that cannot find a focus or concrete resolution (the conclusion to this opus is maddeningly limp) is considered a masterpiece? Carter sees fit to leave his work a jumble of ideas, thinly marked with vague, pretentious terms.

For instance, he depicts the United States as “the paler nation” and “the darker nation.” Wayne C. Booth used, among others, a famous quote from Percy Lubbock as an epigraph to “The Rhetoric of Fiction,” stating “the only law that binds the novelist throughout, whatever course he is pursuing, is the need to be consistent on some plan, to follow the principle he has adopted.” Perhaps Carter, and many more of his peers, should take heed of that statement, and try and remember just why it is we read novels in the first place.