More than 20 years ago there was a lot of press for this book that ticked many boxes for me — literary thriller! Written by a professor! Good pre-publication press! I meant to get around to reading it, and just never did.

Then, in June, LitHub‘s crime & mystery spinoff CrimeReads did a big about great coastal mysteries and right there on the list was Stephen L. Carter’s The Emperor of Ocean Park, and I remembered.

We were on the verge of our move, so I FIRST sought to get it from the library — but that seemed fraught, given our impending 1300 mile move, and in the end I surrendered and paid Amazon for a $9.99 Kindle edition. Fine.

The book starts slow. This is fine, I thought. The problem is: it STAYS slow. Honestly, the whole thing is an intensely navel-gazey SLOG by a guy who spends more time complaining about culture and judicial confirmation than anything else. The plot is full of unearned twists, and only barely resolves. The spurts of action feel deeply out of place in this ruminating, long-winded book. And yet: Carter got a multimillion dollar advance on this thing.

Coming finally to the Wiki article, I find a number of the quoted negative reviews to be entirely spot on:

In an episode of the Newsnight Review for the BBC, novelist Ian Rankin said he thought the book was “very well written but badly constructed” due to the conflation of a number of thriller cliches, and that the over-complicated plot obscured a great story. The A.V. Club suggested Carter had a tendency to overwrite…

Others said that the writing was at times clunky, and the extensive social commentary detracted from the narrative flow. In a negative review for the London Review of Books, critic Lorin Stein described the book as “long-winded [and] shoddily put together”, and discussed why many American reviewers paid deference to what he thought was a high-toned airport novel.

There are reasons this book is an important milestone culturally, of course — Carter is African-American, and his protagonist is a thinly veiled version of himself, at least in setup: also a law professor at a school very like where Carter himself teaches (Yale). The families involved are wealthy African Americans in New England, a tribe of folks not well represented in American letters. That’s good. But goddamn if I just wish the book wasn’t better.