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Executive
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2007
Book Reviews |
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New
England White by Stephen L. Carter |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Mirrors In his new novel, New
England White, Stephen L. Carter reprises two characters from The
Emperor of Ocean Park, as he offers readers almost 600 pages to explore
with him why people do what they do. Using the structure of a mystery, Carter
explores personal and intimate relationships, racial conflict, family
dynamics, parenting, and privilege. Here’s an excerpt, from
the beginning of Chapter 2, “The Terriers,” pp. 16-20: The
detectives were sleek and white and very polite, either because that was
their nature or out of deference to Lemaster, president of the university,
for him just a stepping-stone, as he and his wife discussed but only with
each other, and everyone else assumed, to a more impressive sinecure. They
arrived at the house on the crest of Hunter’s Meadow Road just before ten on
Saturday, escorted by a fidgety officer from the minuscule Tyler’s Landing
force, a doughy man named Nilsson, whose doughy son had been in Julia’s
basic-science class four years ago—the same year she was fired, or quit,
depending on how you looked at it—two eager terriers from the state police,
their quiet voices and brush-cut brown hair so well matched that they might
have been twins. They reminded her, in their grim and mannerly
professionalism, of the Naval officers who came to the house on North Baich
Street in Hanover, New Hampshire, in a Reagan-era October to inform her
mother and latest temporary stepfather that her twin brother, Jay, a Marine,
had died in Grenada. Julia, newly wed as well as newly a mother, had been
home by painful coincidence, for Mona Veazie had celebrated her fifty-third
birthday the day before, and had spent it dandling her grandson, Preston,
named for Mona’s father, the architect. So the daughter had the opportunity
to sit in the living room and watch her mother die a little, too. By
the time the detectives rang the bell of the house called Hunter’s Heights—up
here every dwelling had a name—the unpredicted snow was over, and Mr. Huebner
from town had plowed the long, snaking driveway not once but twice. Bright
morning sunshine exploded from the shimmering whiteness hard enough to make
her eyeballs ache. Or maybe the ache had a more fundamental source: although
Julia had finished crying for a while, little Jeannie, sniffling from her
cold, had caught Mommy raging at herself in the bathroom mirror, where an earlier,
happier self smiled sadly back at her. This could not, Julia told herself~
be happening. But it could. The detectives were a gray-visaged reminder of
the hard truth that death stalks every life. So, when Lemaster summoned her,
she washed her face and fixed her makeup and went down to see what they
wanted. Over the handful of hours since the discovery of the body, they had
done a lot of homework. Just a few details, they said. A couple of questions,
folks, sorry to bother you so early, but this is a murder investigation. You
understand. The Carlyles
understood. They all sat in the
living room, where Lemaster had stoked a fresh fire in the grate underneath
the indifferent watercolor of solemn people on an Atlantic-side beach in
Barbados, and, no, thank you, the detectives did not care for anything to
drink. Julia, craving a glass of wine despite the hour, followed her
husband’s sober example and stuck to water. Lemaster’s special assistant,
Flew, rallying round the boss in the crisis, had put out a copious platter of
everything he could find— crackers, cold cuts, Brie—but no one except Julia
partook. She felt a glutton, tortured and exposed by her husband’s
abstemiousness. Jeannie, supposedly resting, was more likely on the upstairs
landing listening in. Sleek, competent Flew was probably listening, too,
perhaps from the butler’s pantry, unless he was scrubbing the kitchen, for he
hated all messes, but those that cluttered his boss’s life particularly: every
time Flew walked into the house on Hunter’s Meadow and began to look around,
Julia felt hopeless, and judged. Vanessa was in her room, door firmly shut,
likely asleep but possibly on the computer, for she had evolved her own
methods of burying the pain and confusion of mortal experience. As had stolid
Lemaster. The family Bible stood on the mantelpiece, twelve inches high,
creamy and intrusive. The Book of Common Prayer, 1928 version, stood next to it, for Lemaster Carlyle ran a
traditional Anglican home and took a perverse pride in not caring who knew
it. The twin terriers
said they knew how hard this must be, but their matched eyes said they
didn’t. They sat side by side on the brushed leather sofa, imported from
Italy, that Lemaster hated for its ostentation, for he possessed the
immigrant’s thrift. Doughy Nilsson perched alone on a wooden ladderback
armchair of intricate design, one of the few pieces Julia had retained from
Mona’s house in New Hampshire. Like the Louis XV writing desk in the front
hall, the aging chair had as its original provenance her grandmother’s famous
townhouse in Harlem. There had been a day, as Mona put it, when everyone who
was anyone in the darker nation passed through Arnaretta Veazie’s salon: by
which she meant, anyone who aspired to position in what they called the Clan,
the heavily fortified borders of which, once upon a time, Granny Vee and her
buddies diligently patrolled, lest the wrong sort of Negroes force their way
in. When she tried
to explain the Clan to her white friends, they never quite got it. But Julia
was not surprised: whenever she mentioned that her family had been architects
for seven generatiofl5~ even most black people looked at her pityingly, as if
she had exaggerated a tale of her forebears building their own shanties.
Whereas in actuality Veazie & Elden had been, back in the nineteenth
century, one of the five largest architectural firms in Manhattan. The terriers
did not seem the sort to take an interest in the social history of the
community. Their elaborate questions came with a slowness that was fresh
torture. They spent a lot of time flipping through their notebooks. Julia
wanted to strangle them, and even placid Lemaster seemed edgy beneath his
politesse, but an almost palpable air of impending tragedy hangs over
encounters between black Americans and white police, and the best intentions
of all sides have nothing to do with it. Nor was Julia certain that their
intentions were the best, but her mind just now was in two hundred different
places. They pressed on. They kept asking why the Carlyles had chosen that route
home, seeming to doubt the whole daughter-at-the-movies story. Vanessa, the
skinnier of the terriers pointed out, had driven back to the house with her
boyfriend. Julia explained that the teen’s decision had defied her father’s
edict. Lemaster had forgiven the breach because he understood Vanessa’s worry
at her parents’ tardiness. The story felt laborious even to Julia, and the
detectives must have agreed, for they interrupted to point out that Four Mile
was an old logging road, running over water company property, and posted
against trespassing. “Everybody
takes Four Mile,” said Julia uncertainly, before Lemaster could stop her. “Not everybody
found the body,” said the skinnier. No. but
somebody had to, she almost spouted, feeling like the divinity student she had
once been, arguing over the fallacy of synchronicity. “And that’s
why we’re all here,” said Lemaster, with brio. A break while little Flew
stepped in, towheaded and freckly, offering round cups of hot chocolate on a
tray. Julia took one to be polite, but the detectives didn’t. Their eyes
followed him out of the room. They asked
about cars that preceded them and cars that followed them, they asked about
whether cell phones ever worked out there, they asked about footprints and
tire marks, they asked if the Carlyles had seen anyone else, they asked why
Lemaster had taken his eyes off the road, they asked why he had touched the
body: as a former prosecutor, surely he knew— Lemaster delivered a quiet,
confident answer to every question. Sitting in the overdecorated room,
surrounded by the sort of ostentation for which the Clan had once been
famous, memory tumbling harshly through her head, Julia found herself more
than willing to let her husband take the lead. Her thoughts were none too
reliable at the moment. She was missing snatches of conversation. Although
sitting down, she felt like she was wobbling on her feet. She had barely
slept. She had phoned both the boys—Aaron at Phillips Exeter, Preston at
M.I.T.—and had fielded easily two dozen calls so far this morning. Reporters
she turned over to Flew, who had arrived at the crack of dawn and was expert
at delivering a piece of his mind. Most of the rest were members of her club,
Ladybugs, who in their fluttery way were drawn to disaster, each Sister Lady,
as if reading from a script, announcing that she was “sorry to wake you” but
had “heard the news” and “wanted to see how you’re holding up”—but, really,
to probe for inside information to match against whatever rumors were
circulating already through the county’s thin community of middling and
higher-class African America. That was what the members called themselves,
Sister Ladies, emphasizing both their intimacy and their distinctiveness. You
had to be somebody to get in, the
older members liked to say, mainly in reminiscence, because nowadays a black
woman could become somebody in a single generation: not exactly the way
things had worked back in the day. Much later,
when the winter turned bleak and scary, it was this moment that Julia would remember:
sitting in the living room looking out on the early snow, the detectives
plodding through their questions, while stray thoughts teased her
mind—thoughts of Ladybugs, thoughts of Granny Vee, the thoughts of stories
she had heard all her life about the old Harlem days when the Clan still
mattered, even to black people not a part of it. It was almost as though,
even on the terrible morning after she discovered the body of Kellen Zant,
Julia Carlyle knew that the answer to the mystery that would soon coil around
her wounded family lay in the darker nation’s shadowed past. Carter’s
writing along with his philosophical wonder attracts intelligent and
thoughtful readers. New
England White will not disappoint. Steve
Hopkins, October 25, 2007 |
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The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the November
2007 issue
of Executive Times URL for this review: ttp://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/New
England White.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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