New England White
By Stephen L. Carter
Knopf, 556 pages, $26.95
In a clever inversion of Conrad, we are deep in “‘the heart of whiteness'” in Stephen L. Carter’s new thriller, following an affluent African-American couple who would make the rest of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Talented Tenth look like underachievers. Lemaster, the husband, is a university president and former White House counsel, and of West Indian origins; Julia, the wife, is a deputy dean of the university’s Divinity School and the scion of old Harlem high society and generations of architects.
Carter’s title, “New England White,” is a play on nature and race. Much of this whodunit takes place in winter, with snow filtering down. And as Julia writes in a letter to her mother, who had been a professor at Dartmouth College and raised Julia and her brother in Hanover, N.H., “the town was wonderful, but, like all New England, white.”
From the novel’s opening pages it is clear how much fun Carter intends to have playing the race card, so to speak, as a potential trump in an approaching presidential election and also within the cultural surround of this unnamed university in an unnamed state, a locale not far by car or train from Boston or New York.
Like Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” this will be partly a tale of hidden levers of power and a secret society, here an old male club among the black elite, with murders and attempted murders fueling the politico-academic frisson as religion and economic theory contend in their explanations of human behavior.
Physically, in its “ugly swankness” the Hilliman Social Science Tower, home of economics at the university, looks “condescendingly down on” the rabble of Kepler Quadrangle, province of the Divinity School, “the one where truth was measurable but not eternal, the other where truth was eternal but not measurable.”
Amid Carter’s plotted maze of unknown motives and circumstance live the members of “the paler nation” and “the darker nation,” rubrics used throughout “New England White,” although it is also true, as Julia’s grandmother used to say, “there are our black people and there are other black people — and all her life Julia had secretly believed it.” She’s an elitist by upbringing, in other words, married to a power broker whose assumedly good motives are repeatedly called into question.
Carter’s characters often telegraph political messages (the theory of the leaders of the secret men’s club, the Empyreals, Lemaster explains to Julia, is that ” ‘America won’t cross the street to help a black man, not if it’s not forced to’ “), but those are served up puckishly and with nuance, amid the theatrics of a triple-murder mystery and the many requisite reversals of perspective such stories entail. The last thing “New England White” resembles is a political tract, although it does represent sly cultural reporting of difference, masquerading as genre fiction.
At the level of detail, for instance, Lemaster and Julia Carlyle and their children always name their pet — variously a cat or dog — Rainbow Coalition. Julia comes from a loose grouping of relatives and friends who refer to themselves as the Clan. And that’s not to mention the character whose aggressive dog is named Goetz (after, one assumes, Bernhard Goetz, the white man who shot four black teens who accosted him in the New York City subway in 1984). Or black youth DeShaun Moton, shot to death by police in an incident 30 years in the past in “New England White” but suddenly relevant to the presidential election. DeShaun’s mother tells Julia, ” ‘Eight cops around him, he should’ve been real safe,’ ” an occurrence that may call to mind the fate of Amadou Diallo, shot 19 times by four New York police officers in 1999.
Calling the village of Tyler’s Landing, where the Carlyles live, “the heart of whiteness” was Lemaster’s idea. There are only five families of color there, and the locals do keep track, reports Vera Brightwood, the town gossip and confectioner, ” ‘because of money. Nothing against the coloreds, mind, but real estate has been pretty flat around here lately and . . .’ ” She is offset (perhaps) by an antique-shop owner who is well aware of the poor attitude of some merchants but brags to Julia, his best customer, ” ‘I do business with anybody who walks through that door,’ ” and even expands that to assert, ” ‘We need more minorities.’ “
Despite that proclamation, the truth is that after six years of Carlyle life out where the houses stand significantly apart:
“Here was the secret segregated truth at the heart of integration. No vandalism was committed. No crosses were burned. No epithets were uttered. The family was not attacked. It was simply ignored.”
At least, that was the case until the family, in the person of Julia, did come under attack. The body of an old flame of hers and sometimes opponent of Lemaster’s, economics professor Kellen Zant, is found by the couple at the opening of “New England White,” kicking off its whirligig plot. (Readers of Carter’s first novel, “The Emperor of Ocean Park,” will find themselves in familiar terrain with elements including the affluent black milieu, death under suspicious circumstances and the Ivy League-like academic setting. Carter, a law professor at Yale University, contends that institution is not his fictional setting in either novel.)
Zant had been shot while trying to profit from an unspecified ” ‘surplus,’ ” an element of desire among several competing parties, and those parties come to believe that what was in Zant’s possession, or access to it, has been passed on to Julia. Zant told writer Mary Mallard, who is among those who begin to harass Julia, that he ” ‘had the goods on a major political figure.’ ” Julia fears this might relate to a 30-year-old murder, one that was pinned on Moton but that may have been committed by the man now president of the U.S. Furthermore, the man now president of the local university — her husband — may be helping to cover it up.
Lemaster assures Julia he is ” ‘aggressively neutral’ ” on the coming election, although he identifies one main societal problem:
” ‘You know what the trouble is? The Caucasians aren’t afraid of us any more.’ ” Both the White House incumbent (never named, but he is a Republican nicknamed “Scrunchy” and a former frat boy and drinker) and his likely principal challenger, senior Democratic Sen. Malcolm Whisted, were suitemates of Lemaster’s in college, along with a now-dead young man of significant family means, Jonathan “Jock” Hilliman. One or more of the four men (Lemaster is the only non-white) may have been involved in the killing of Gina Joule, the daughter of a professor, who was last seen talking to Moton three decades ago. Any or all of the three surviving suitemates may know the truth.
So, too, may Kellen Zant have known the truth, which caused his life to be seen as surplus by someone with a gun. That is the setup of “New England White,” as suspicions of guilt — new or old — drift here and there like the snow. Carter has peopled the book with colorful characters, many of them with a political agenda in tow, whether of national import (on behalf of the White House) or local concern (university officials and alums). Lemaster’s fiery cousin Astrid, a Washington hotshot who works for Whisted and believes ” ‘[t]hese have been terrible years for our country,’ ” begs Julia to lobby Lemaster, warning:
” ‘You cannot live your life on the fence. You cannot evade the responsibility to take sides.’ “
And then there is Vanessa Carlyle, Lemaster and Julia’s teenage daughter, who seems to have taken Gina Joule’s side, whatever that is. Vanessa (who spends her time listening to funeral dirges and studying famous war battles) has researched Gina’s murder, but more disturbingly, claims to be in communication with the dead girl as well. Why she set fire to her father’s midnight-blue Mercedes on the 30th anniversary of Gina’s death is unknown.
Theresa Vinney, mother of presumed murderer DeShaun Moton, relates a story as mysterious and frightening as any in the novel when Julia approaches her seeking information. Theresa’s father used to shine shoes for university students. He would stand outside the dormitory with other boys — being black, they were not allowed inside — while the students threw shoes out the window. ” ‘[T]he Negro boys would all fight over them,’ ” Theresa tells Julia. The darker nation indeed.
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Art Winslow, a former literary editor and executive editor of The Nation, is a frequent contributor to the Tribune.
