It’s interesting that attorney and author Stephen Carter’s 2002 bestselling novel about wealth, power, and politics, “The Emperor of Ocean Park,” set in Chicago and Martha’s Vineyard, is making its screen debut right now on MGM+, available through Amazon Prime. It was also a little ironic that I spoke to him on the front porch of a grand old Oak Bluffs cottage that looked out on the park, on a brilliantly sunny day. Carter was in the middle of an early summer getaway to the Island, something he’s enjoyed for 60 years. He and his wife, Enola Aird, have been bringing their own family for decades. Carter was pleased about the television series, but bemused as well, because the rights were optioned more than 20 years ago.
Carter admitted he doesn’t know much about Hollywood, but he is grateful for the opportunity to see the book on the screen.
“John Wells [executive producer] is such a great guy, and he was a believer in this project for a long time,” Carter says. “They finally got this, and I’m very excited about it.”
Carter hadn’t viewed the series yet when I spoke to him, but said he’s hearing “good buzz.” I caught the first episode on opening night, July 14, and it was stellar. It’s about the Garland clan, headed by the now deceased Judge Oliver Garland, and his children. The siblings are varied in their talents and interests, but daughter Mariah (a former awardwinning journalist) isn’t buying that her father succumbed to a heart attack. She thinks there’s something deeper and more nefarious going on, and after watching, I think she’s right.
“They sent me scripts, and I gave them comments on them, but how many of my comments made it to the screen I don’t know,” Carter said.
The story is also set in Ivy League academia, another familiar area for Carter who is a professor of law at Yale Law School, where he graduated in 1979 and began teaching in 1982. He’s written several nonfiction books on law, but also has a half-dozen novels under his belt. He’s become a sought-after crime novelist, who squeezes in law, politics, academia, civil rights, and even Christianity and chess into his writing. We talked about the craft of writing while sitting on that lovely porch. Carter said he thought it was interesting that people assume that the characters in his books come from people he knows in real life.
“The persona I invented for Talcott Garland happened to be in the academic world … but I never intended it to be my point of view,” Carson explained. “Nevertheless, I’ve always been partial to the academic novel — Jane Smiley’s ‘Moo,’ which is a title that I love, and the Saul Bellow novel ‘The Dean’s December.’ I’ve just always loved academic novels, but to make an academic novel work, you have to invent a lot of characters who are pretty slimy, who are in the academic world, and so people would ask me, ‘Is this based on your colleagues?’ No.”
Carter talked about the inherent “spookiness” of an Ivy League campus at night with all the Gothic towers, and imagining walking through them in the dark.
“Campuses, in a small way, for better or worse, do reflect the societies that they’re in, so one would expect in a story that has a campus at the heart of it that it has all the same problems and same people as we have in real life.”
One of the best compliments he’s had, Carter said, is when someone said to him that she knew characters just like those in his novels: “One of the things I tried to do in my writing is to make characters realistic, while what happens to them isn’t often realistic. That’s where the invention comes in. They have strengths and weaknesses; most of them are not heroes or villains — they’re just people.”
I told Carter that I enjoyed his writing style, and that his character Talcott Garland in “The Emperor of Ocean Park” seemed a little insecure to me. Garland is a law professor at Elm Harbor University, yet he seems lonely and uneasy about his wife Kimmer, a high-powered lawyer herself.
“I’m glad you spotted that,” Carter said. “I think that’s true, and that makes him, for lack of a better word, resentful. He has a lot of cynicism and suspicion.”
It took Carter years to complete his first novel. “There are versions of it in my files that I wrote on an IBM Selectric typewriter, back in the early 1980s,” he said. “The story is different, but you’d recognize some of the characters and some bits of the story. I fiddled with it for a while. Then my academic career began, and I was busy writing nonfiction, writing lots and lots of law review articles. I didn’t get serious about it until probably the late ’90s or so, and then once I settled down to write it, I probably spent a couple of years pulling all those different things together. And believe me, it was once even longer.”
Carter and his family had a house on the Island, but sold it years ago, realizing they weren’t able to use it as much as they would have liked. Now they come maybe a few weeks a year, spending a relaxing time with family and friends. “My son and I do a lot of walking in the morning. I mean long walks, several miles,” he said. “We’ve gotten in the habit of coming before the season starts, because most things are open, but few things are crowded yet.”
We talked some more about writing, and what makes a good novel. He said he still loves mysteries, but also biographies and military history.
“I’ve got a lot of favorites,” he said. “I’ll read almost anything that’s written about Lincoln.”
Carter said he usually brings several books with him when visiting the Island, but forgot a few when loading the car up to drive from Connecticut. Now that he’s written novels, I asked if he reads with a different focus, and he admitted he actually reads less fiction since he’s been published himself.
“Part of the reason was that I would read fiction, and it wasn’t so much that I’d be distracted by, as you say, the style or the voice. What would distract me is that it was as though I could suddenly see the editor’s hand in the places where the author had a change of mind.” That doesn’t happen when he reads nonfiction, he said. “Somehow I don’t have that same sense of automatically seeing the editor’s hand, or seeing that something has changed.”
Decades ago before the internet and posting photos everywhere, writers spent a lot of time on description, and there was more depth to the scenes. Nowadays, Carter said, writers cut right to the chase in the beginning of the story.
“The person is already fleeing through the night chased by the guy with a knife. The heist is underway. You’re in the story already,” Carter said.
He’s been working on a new novel for a while now, set in the ’60s, about a young Black college student who not only becomes radicalized but also becomes an underground revolutionary.
“That’s one that’s been very close to my heart,” he says. “It’s a long-standing project I’m hoping to finish.”
I’m hoping he finishes it soon.
I read “The Emperor of Ocean Park” years ago and loved it. I’m delighted to learn that it has been made into a TV series! Every time I see those big, beautiful houses on Ocean Park I think of that story.
Nice review. Having been in academia myself, I am not so sure about Professor Carter’s declaration that his characters do not resemble some of his colleagues. The Emperor of Ocean Park is a great novel, but don’t overlook Invisible Woman, the remarkable story of his grandmother, Eunice Carter
Comments are closed.