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Published on Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
But Palace Council, the third novel from Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law, intends that statement as a preposterous lie. Everything is about Eddie. That includes the workings of Harlem's high society, the betrayal of Cold War nuclear secrets, the radical student underground, a secret American agenda in Southeast Asia and, last but hardly least, Nixon's inner thoughts.
Eddie is an important black literary figure who wins two National Book Awards and becomes part of the public school curriculum during the course of the novel. ''The muse sits upon me,'' he says before he has even become famous. ''It is not a matter of choice. It is a matter of necessity.'' When others speak of Eddie's work, they tend to incorporate rapt admiration, as in: ''You're a brilliant writer, Eddie. And you're right about the war.''
Oddly enough, this may be the most authentic, realistic aspect of Carter's novel. He himself is a renowned scholar and knows what it's like to be treated accordingly. But he is not enough of a novelist to make this credible on paper. Since Palace Council is predicated on Eddie's strategic importance in post-World War II American history, it therefore has plausibility problems from the start.
This book is couched as a paranoid thriller with historical ramifications. That's not an impossible combination (think The Manchurian Candidate), but it's an awkward one for Carter. The reader is asked to believe that Eddie stumbles on a secret so big, tantalizing and terrible that powerful people will spend decades trying to pry it out of him.
Yet the style of Palace Council is so cool, polished and dilatory that not much seems to be at stake. On Page 471 of a 510-page narrative, when the denouement ought to be coming into view, Carter is writing ''and still the endless night stretched before him'' about Eddie's protracted sleuthing efforts.
Eddie is meant to be even better at investigating a conspiracy than he is at writing classic prose. So when Palace Council presents its first murder, he becomes caught up in detective work. The victim was a white lawyer named Philmont Castle, killed on the grounds of one of Harlem's most famous residences, while he was apparently in possession of an upside-down gold cross with a strange inscription. The inscription leads Eddie to the secret society of the title, but there are important things he does not know.
What is the Palace Council? Who belongs to it? What treachery is this group plotting? And why do the group's secret papers include incomprehensible notations? Suffice it to say that the council's members are at least as dangerous for their literary pretensions as for their designs on the American government.
To affix Eddie to a reason for digging into the council's doings, Carter gives him two sentimental motives. He is in love with Aurelia Treene, who marries a wealthy black man who attends a lot of secret meetings. Can she, Aurie, be linked to the council by marriage? Carter also gives Eddie a sister, and when Junie disappears into some kind of radical underground, Eddie must retrieve her.
Both searches are attenuated by the many cameo appearances that adorn Palace Council and are some measure of the book's mettle. Carter's Nixon is just a nervous fellow who drops his pronouns (''Have to stick it out for the sake of the presidency''), calls student radicals bums and often says ''let me make one thing perfectly clear.'' Miraculously, this Nixon neglects to tell Eddie that he is not a crook.
For all its efforts to weave an intrigue plot into a timeline of big events, Palace Council is most comfortable with Eddie's immediate circle. A couple of characters link this book to Carter's earlier novels, The Emperor of Ocean Park (2002) and New England White (2007). And they do it in ways that underscore what is still most promising about his fiction.
In all three books he explores a rarefied black world that he treats as a parallel universe to better-known white society, with an elite that has its own ideas about success and distinction. When Eddie isn't wowing America at large, he is navigating artfully among old Harlem doyennes and power brokers. It is in this realm, with the burden of history temporarily lifted, that Palace Council feels most like a novel — and most at home.
But Palace Council, the third novel from Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law, intends that statement as a preposterous lie. Everything is about Eddie. That includes the workings of Harlem's high society, the betrayal of Cold War nuclear secrets, the radical student underground, a secret American agenda in Southeast Asia and, last but hardly least, Nixon's inner thoughts.
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