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Race and PowerThe real mystery at the heart of New England White.

By Emily BernardPosted Tuesday, June 19, 2007, at 4:38 PM ET

New England White. Stephen L. Carter has something to tell you, and it isn't pretty. It certainly looks attractive, on the surface. Like his first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, New England White features an appealing group of characters, almost all of whom inhabit the sleek, insular world of the black bourgeoisie. At the center of the story are Lemaster and Julia Carlyle, who played minor roles in Carter's debut. In The Emperor, Barbados-born Lemaster is "a small man with a huge mind," a colleague of the main character Talcott Garland, who considers Lemaster unlikable but admires him all the same. In New England White, Lemaster has been made president of the same unnamed Ivy League university featured in the first novel. Julia is a dean at the divinity school. She drives an expensive car and collects antiques. She has a passion for mirrors.

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The Emperor of Ocean Park was heralded in prominent venues by reviewers who marveled at the depiction of a world of black privilege they had no idea existed. In the pages of New England White, Carter anticipates the same reaction to his second novel: "Of the existence of the old families, with their money and education and tradition, most black Americans and nearly all white ones knew nothing. Of the secrets of their exclusive fraternities and sororities, outsiders knew far less than they thought they did." The characters in both novels not only have money, they have old money; and they measure success in surnames, summer homes, and degrees, just like their white counterparts.

But elite blacks and whites are not mirror images, however much they resemble one another in their ambitions, preoccupations, and indulgences. They intersect without ever truly merging. Hence Carter's distinction between the "darker nation" and the "paler nation," terms that course through both novels. Still, within the terms is a larger truth: The two groups are interdependent—darker than whom? paler than whom?—and rely on each other for a sense of identity, whether they like it or not.

New England White is as concerned as its predecessor with the divisions and intersections between the two nations. And, like The Emperor, it employs the framework of a murder mystery to inquire into even larger mysteries: Will racial integration ever be a reality? Barring that, what about an end to racial injustice? The answers begin—and end—with a murder, in a novel that casts a newly cynical light on a deep-rooted social dilemma.

Driving home from a dinner party one evening, Lemaster and Julia Carlyle careen off a back road and discover a corpse. The body belongs to Kellen Zant, an African-American professor of economics at the university, and a former lover of Julia Carlyle. The relationship ended before her marriage to Lemaster, but her attachment to Kellen never waned. That he loved Julia unceasingly and then wound up on the side of a road is not a coincidence.

Who killed Kellen Zant, and why? Everyone suspects Julia knows more than she is telling. She barely has time to mourn her old love before she finds herself fielding interrogations from strangers about the "surplus" Kellen supposedly entrusted to her. This economic term—which is defined for Julia as "the difference between the value of a good to you and what you pay for it"—turns out to be connected to a blackmail plot. That plot in turn points to a central theme of the novel, which Carter develops through recurrent (and sometimes obfuscating) economic metaphors: Human lives, despite so much rhetoric about equality, are assigned very different currencies by the calculating elites of both races.

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Emily Bernard, an associate professor at the University of Vermont, is the editor of Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, and Some of My Best Friends: Writings on Interracial Friendship.

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