New England White
By Stephen L. Carter
(Knopf, 2007, 556 pages)
Reviewed by Ina R. Bort
From the New York Law Journal
October 17, 2007
Stephen Carter omitted one very important character from the throngs who populate New England White: a marriage therapist. Lemaster and Julia Carlyle, the married couple at the heart of this murder mystery by Yale Law professor Stephen Carter, could have greatly benefited from a few counseling sessions.
Viewed from the outside, Lemaster, the president of an unnamed university located in the city of Elm Harbor (and a "friend of Presidents of the United States and billionaires"), and his lovely wife Julia, the dean of that university's divinity school, seem to have it all. They are a successful, attractive, wealthy, and well-connected African American couple with four children (the eldest at Harvard), living in a well-tended mansion on a huge piece of property. And they have, by choosing to make their home in Tyler's Landing, an Elm Harbor suburb, bravely penetrated "The Heart of Whiteness" (as Chapter 64 is entitled — yes, there are 68 chapters plus an Epilogue in this book), or at least have tried.
The mixed results of the Carlyles' racial- barrier-breaking efforts, and Carter's dour view of race relations, are what most reviewers of New England White discuss. (With good reason; the book teems with bitter commentary on the gulf between the "paler nation" and the "darker nation" and how never the twain shall meet).
But at least as depressing as Carter's view of relations between blacks and whites is his portrayal of relations between man and wife. By the end of the first chapter of New England White, we can see that the Carlyle marriage is a troubled one: "Julia . . . did as her husband suggested. He was eight years her senior, a difference that had once provided her a certain assurance but in recent years had left her feeling more and more that he treated her like a child."
If Julia is the child in the relationship, Lemaster is the neglectful parent. He is most often described as "out of town as usual." In his capacity as university president, he is constantly on trips to raise money for his prestigious institution. In the little time he does spend at home, he is usually holed up in his home office, talking in hushed tones on the phone or with an Important Guest behind a locked door that Julia knows better than to knock on.
Julia gets no special dispensation from Lemaster during the work day, either. Her status as his wife (much less the dean of the divinity school) carries no special weight when it comes to his busy schedule: "Lemaster was able to give his wife ten minutes that afternoon in his capacious Lombard Hall office, right before the provost and vice-president for finance . . . and right after the leaders of a student protest movement . . ." Isn't that romantic?
As the book proceeds (and proceeds, and proceeds), the Carlyle Couple only seems more estranged, and we learn of just how large a divide separates Julia from her husband. At a party, Julia stands apart, observing her husband and musing: "Lemaster was doing his thing, telling raucous jokes that kept the whole bunch of them tittering. . . captivated by the wit he never displayed at home. On occasions like this, Julia often felt they had passed through the looking glass into a magical world in which Lemaster was a charmer rather than the affectionately distant man who shared her bed. . . ." Julia is an outsider to her own marriage to the point that, in one of the last chapters, she is described at looking at Lemaster and "not knowing who he was." Pathetically, when Lemaster deigns to share with her an extremely significant piece of information about himself (I won't ruin that surprise here) , she thinks: "It felt nice to learn a few of her husband's secrets, even if she sensed the deeper, more fascinating secrets hiding just beneath them." And even at moments of ostensible intimacy, Lemaster's true self lies beyond Julia's grasp: "Now, sex finished, she clung to him, wondering what secrets he was truly carrying . . . 'You're a good man,' said Julia, kissing his shoulder as he slept. She pressed closer. 'A good man,' she said, hoping it was true."
The particularly sad thing about all of this is that Julia is actually a strong person in every context other than her marriage. She is proud of her extremely elite family, the Veazies, whose Harlem social circle included cultural dignitaries like Duke Ellington. Her grandmother's house served as a headquarters of literature and music, where salons were held on a regular basis.
Julia also had the strength to break free from the seductive but ultimately destructive grip of Kellen Zant, the lusty economics professor whose murder drives the mystery (such as it is) of New England White. And she is the indefatigable heroine of the story, the self-appointed detective whose wits and perseverance enable her eventually to solve Zant's murder and to connect the many dots that link that murder to an Elm Harbor murder that happened many decades ago. (Unfortunately, she is not brilliant enough to solve the mysteries in fewer than 556 pages, by which time we readers are so confused by the convoluted plot that any sense of shocking revelation is long lost).
Why is this brainy woman reduced to no more than Le Servant when it comes to Lemaster? It may be that Carter simply cannot imagine a marriage that does not consist of one dictator, one supplicant. For the marriage at the center of his previous novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, makes the Carlyles look like Rudy and Judy Giuliani.
Talcott and Kimmer Garland, Carterphiles may recall, had ample contempt for each other, although in their case it was the wife who was in charge. Talcott lamented: "There are depths to my wife I am often too afraid to plumb, and my fears have done as much as her conduct to sour the sweetest parts of our marriage." They fought over money and the fact that Kimmer made only minimal effort to conceal her adulterous relationships. At one point Kimmer tells Talcott that he "should have affairs to balance hers; that [he] should fall in love with somebody else and leave, sparing her the necessity of hurting [him] any longer; that my constancy in the face of her dalliances marks not Christian virtue but secular wimpiness."
Carter never explains why or how these couples, whose relationships are tainted by mistrust, secrecy and aloofness, stick together. The Carlyles and the Garlands have children, although it's hard to see how their parents' nominal preservation of the marriage is helping any of them.
Vanessa Carlyle, for one, is not doing too well, having set fire to her father's car some months before New England White opens and now seeing a psychotherapist on a regular basis. Her hobbies include listening to funeral dirges into the wee hours of the morning. Neither of Julia's sons speaks to her, and they always find convenient excuses to avoid coming home from boarding school or college for the holidays. Not exactly a portrayal of familial bliss.
Carter explained in one interview that: "Love is complicated. Relationships are difficult. Marriage is nearly impossible, and nobody would ever do it, except that it is also impossibly sweet." It's a nice sentiment, but where the sweetness lies may be the real mystery at the heart of New England White.
