Palace Council [Paperback]

Carter's first novel, "The Emperor of Ocean Park," gained a lot of attention through its John Grisham endorsement and huge advance. Intrigued, I had to read it for myself, and found it to be well-written, intricate, and sometimes ponderous. I picked up a copy of "New England White," and found it to be much the same, but I didn't have the time or patience to finish that one, so I set it aside.

Despite that last hiccup, I dove into "Palace Council" and found myself immersed in conspiracy theories, great characters, witty repartee, and interesting glimpses into our nation's history. Carter takes his time drawing readers into the lives of Eddie and Aurelia, a rising black novelist and the woman he loves but who has married an upper-class politico. Eddie's heart is further tested when something happens to his sister. These events, along with the discovery of a body in a park, lead him on a lengthy chase through the corridors of power and the racial and political issues of his day. We meet Langston Hughes, JFK, Richard Nixon, and others. For those willing to forge through five hundred pages, there are numerous social insights and questions raised.

At the heart of the story, as in Carter's other novels, mystery abounds. If you're looking for a Lee Child thriller, though, this is not it. Some have the patience for this type of cerebral thriller, others have not. For me, it was a rewarding read, made all the better by the investment I had to put in. Now I'll go back and finish "New England White." I'm convinced that Carter will make it worth my while.

This is a big, sprawling novel whose reach exceeds its grasp. The characters are compelling, the settings are consistently interesting, the social milieu is fascinating, but the plot, after beginning with great promise, wobbles and shakes and finally crashes into a sort of incoherence. There's a conspiracy at the center of things, a vast, ambitious conspiracy, but instead of tightening and becoming more ominous as the book goes on, it becomes vaguer and more diffuse. There is an artificial feel to things. Characters seem to appear and events occur strictly because the author wants them to, rather than as a result of any organic storytelling. Mysteries are not adequately explained. Clues are apparently understood by the characters (such as when one of them knows where to look for some papers in a haunted mansion) but never shared with the reader. By the end you will be scratching your head and wondering what all the fuss (and 500 pages) was about. Still, despite all this, it is an enjoyable summer read, especially as a privileged look in on a genteel mid-20th-Century African-American society as it was breaking up and vanishing from the face of the earth.

Stephen L. Carter's PALACE COUNCIL story of Edward Trotter Wesley Jr. begins in 1952 and spans more than twenty years. Eddie, the son of a respected black preacher, grew up in a culturally and intellectually thriving upper-class Harlem he later captured, to acclaim but also to skepticism in books of his own: When Eddie's fourth novel, NETHERWHITE, was published, "The white critics praised its sharp satiric eye, not realizing that everything Eddie wrote about Harlem he meant literally. The critics did not believe, even after reading the novel, that a wealthy black society actually existed in the secret uptown shadows of their own." Not coincidentally, the same may be said of how law professor Carter's novels -- this one surely -- are greeted.

Eddie, after his youth in Harlem, graduated from Amherst and launched a splashy career as a writer of mostly fiction, about and appealing to the "dark nation," his persistent term for black America. Following the failure to win the hand of Aurelia Treene, "his unattainably highborn girlfriend." he, like another fictional character who is famous for comparing life to a box of chocolates, trawled through our recent history. During the fifties, sixties, and seventies he witnessed key events and encountered notables such as Langston Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon (whom Aurelia knows as "Dick"). Although plot purposes sometimes distort timelines in PALACE COUNCIL, the civil rights struggle, the national turmoil of the Vietnam war, and Watergate served as backdrops for Eddie's colorful life.

These upheavals also formed the impetus for the formation of domestic urban guerrilla organizations such as the real Weathermen and the Black Panthers. Eddie focused on a radical group named Jewel Agony that he feared his vanished law-school educated sister, Junie, had run away to join.

While Eddie, over the years, grasped at any and all clues as to his sister's whereabouts, he was also very busy on other fronts: "Had Eddie Wesley been a less reliable man, he would never have stumbled over the body,..battled the devils to a draw, and helped topple a President." Basically, Eddie's run-in with a prominent white man's corpse set him on an enigmatic hunt to unlock the secrets of an elite cell of powerful men, both black and white. They shrouded themselves in symbolism and were less averse to violence in the name of their shadowy cause than Jewel Agony. Painstakingly, Eddie, in tandem with his true love, Aurelia, pieced together an outline of their long-term plan to somehow reshape American society from the top down. Who, then, belonged to this elite group? What was their agenda exactly? How would they implement it?

Carter's erudite prose and his ambitious plot at first blush ought to anchor this book among the summer blockbusters. Certainly, Eddie, Aurelia, and a few other characters stimulate interest in their plights. Yet, there is room for criticism. For all the words showered on them, they are not fully-rounded. For instance, Eddie is defined as a "great" writer often and rather pompously, yet his creative process is virtually absent from PALACE COUNCIL. And Aurelia seems to reveal her self to the reader quite transparently until something she did blind sides us. Because we do follow her quite intimately, it feels as if Carter has cheated; we thought we knew her, but we did not.

Even though a few plot twists may genuinely surprise, as just mentioned, not all will likely meet with reader approval. To muddy the waters, PALACE COUNCIL remains intentionally ambiguous about some aspects of the conspiracies, resulting in an unfinished quality. And I wish the lesson that Eddie had to swallow about his sister's fate and how she answered his faithfulness could have been more rewarding. I wish President Nixon had come off less like a Tricky Dick caricature, especially since he is portrayed as more civil rights-minded, whether out of opportunism or not, than biographies and histories document. Finally, I wish the book's structure had been tightened.

Nevertheless, Eddie and Aurelia and their labyrinth of a story will remain with me for some time to come. They seek to do right, even when they must sacrifice in that pursuit. They are fitted into a world view and circumstances that do intrigue. They are characters worth getting to know in the pages of PALACE COUNCIL.

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