July|August 2002



Fathers, sons, and family secrets; the splintering of a marriage; corruption shrouded by politics and law: These are the suspense-laden elements of this summer's beach book, The Emperor of Ocean Park—the first novel by Stephen L. Carter, the Yale Law School professor best known for his writing about public affairs. But it's the setting of the book that makes it a real surprise.

Fifteen years ago, the Chicago lawyer and former prosecutor Scott Turow published his first novel, Presumed Innocent, which began the transformation of the legal thriller into one of the best-read forms of popular fiction in the United States. For Carter and Turow, it is anger and eros, ambition and confusion, and the vengeance provoked by humiliating old wounds that turn the law into a treacherous instrument—and that make it so compelling.

Their books are page turners because of the shards of plot and psyche that they bury, unearth, and piece together. They write why-dunnits. On that score, their success should be measured by the standard the poet W.H. Auden (see "Law Like Love," p. 72) set for detective thrillers by Raymond Chandler, that they "should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art."

Where mysteries took readers into the police stations and P.I. offices and onto the streets where messes are cleaned up, the legal thriller takes us into the sanctums where judges and lawyers make those messes. As an accomplished African-American, Carter cracks open a subculture he knows well. The "Ocean Park" of the title is on the island of Martha's Vineyard in the town of Oak Bluffs, the "middle-class colony" where professionals from what Carter calls "the darker nation" summer. Carter's main characters are sensitive to their status: "Ancestors of ours were free and earning a living when most members of the darker nation were in chains," one says. The novel guides them from Oak Bluffs and the corridors of a top law school ("not modeled on Yale," Carter says gamely but unconvincingly in an author's note) to the chambers of influential judges and the offices of elite law firms.

The world he writes about is rarely open to outsiders. Two decades ago, one of America's leading historians of the legal profession, Robert Gordon, described the large American law firm as "a vast, mysterious, and almost unmapped interior of American society." Most of it was "drawn as blank spaces, with the occasional mysterious notation, 'Diamond Mines,' or warning, 'Here there be Tygers.' "

Since then, nonfiction accounts (including my own book Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire, about the international firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom) have begun to map this interior. The most widely read recent work of nonfiction about law, Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action, has sold as well as a Turow novel.

But the range of territory left to explore is striking, in large firms and far beyond. The basic compact between lawyers and their clients is one reason: Most legal dealings occur in private rather than in public and, by the lawyer's code of conduct, are supposed to be confidential. The incentives of legal scholarship are another: While some disciplines, like legal history and "law and economics," depend on empirical work, among the most respected scholars there's a premium on concepts—on big ideas.

So Carter's asides about the world he's revealing yield noteworthy insights about real legal events. "Nowadays," his protagonist, Misha Garland, says at one point, "my older brother has become a type common to the darker nation: smart, ambitious, well educated, utterly dedicated to the romanticism of the long-shattered civil rights movement, living on the fringes of what remains." Or, as he muses elsewhere: "I suddenly understand the passion of the many black nationalists of the sixties who opposed affirmative action, warning that it would strip the community of the best among its potential leaders, sending them off to the most prestigious colleges, and turning them into...well, into young corporate apparatchiks in Brooks Brothers suits, desperate for the favor of powerful white capitalists."

The back story of this beach book, the stuff that might be skipped by readers who want to read The Emperor of Ocean Park as a plot-driven, John Grisham-type thriller, is an unassuming form of treasure.