Clocking in at over 650 pages, the novel could easily have been streamlined; many of Talcott's thoughts are unnecessarily repeated. But Carter's storytelling skills are adept: tension builds, surprises are genuine, clues are not handed out freely. The prose, while somewhat meandering, can be crisp and insightful, as demonstrated in Carter's description of the misguided paths of young attorneys who sacrifice
all on the altar of career... at last arriving... at their cherished career goals, partnerships, professorships, judgeships, whatever kind of ships they dream of sailing, and then looking around at the angry, empty waters and realizing that they have arrived with nothing, absolutely nothing, and wondering what to do with the rest of their wretched lives.--Michael Ferch ]]>
When The Emperor of Ocean Park was published, Time Out declared: “Carter does for members of the contemporary black upper class what Henry James did for Washington Square society, taking us into their drawing rooms and laying their motives bare.” Now, with the same powers of observation, and the same richness of plot and character, Stephen L. Carter returns to the New England university town of Elm Harbor, where a murder begins to crack the veneer that has hidden the racial complications of the town’s past, the secrets of a prominent family, and the most hidden bastions of African-American political influence.
At the center: Lemaster Carlyle, the university president, and his wife, Julia Carlyle, a deputy dean at the divinity school -- African Americans living in “the heart of whiteness.” Lemaster is an old friend of the president of the United States. Julia was the murdered man’s lover years ago. The meeting point of these connections forms the core of a mystery that deepens even as Julia closes in on the politically earth-shattering motive behind the murder.
Relentlessly suspenseful, galvanizing in its exploration of the profound difference between allegiance to ideas and to people, New England White is a resounding confirmation of Stephen Carter’s gifts as a writer of fiction.]]>
John Grisham called Stephen L. Carter’s first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, “beautifully written and cleverly plotted. A rich, complex family saga, one deftly woven through a fine legal thriller.” The Chicago Tribune hailed Carter’s next book, New England White, as “a whodunit with conscience.” Now this best-selling novelist returns with an electrifying political thriller set in the turbulent era of Watergate and Vietnam, giving us one of the most riveting and naked portraits of Nixon ever written.
In the summer of 1952, twenty prominent men gather at a secret meeting on Martha’s Vineyard and devise a plot to manipulate the President of the United States. Soon after, the body of one of these men is found by Eddie Wesley, Harlem’s rising literary star. When Eddie’s younger sister mysteriously disappears, Eddie and the woman he loves, Aurelia Treene, are pulled into what becomes a twenty-year search for the truth. As Eddie and Aurelia uncover layer upon layer of intrigue, their odyssey takes them from the wealthy drawing rooms of New York through the shady corners of radical politics, all the way to the Oval Office.
Stephen Carter’s novel is as complex as it is suspenseful, and with his unique ability to turn stereotypes inside out, Palace Council is certain to enthrall readers to the very last page.]]>
Stephen L. Carter’s brilliant debut, The Emperor of Ocean Park, spent eleven week son the New York Times best-seller list. Now, in Jericho’s Fall, Carter turns his formidable talents to the shadowy world of spies, official secrecy, and financial fraud in a thriller that rivets the reader’s attention until the very last page.
In an imposing house in the Colorado Rockies, Jericho Ainsley, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency and a Wall Street titan, lies dying. He summons to his beside Beck DeForde, the younger woman for whom he threw away his career years ago, miring them both in scandal. Beck believes she is visiting to say farewell. Instead, she is drawn into a battle over an explosive secret that foreign governments and powerful corporations alike want to wrest from Jericho before he dies.
An intricate and timely thriller that plumbs the emotional depths of a failed love affair and a family torn apart by mistrust, Jericho’s Fall takes us on a fast-moving journey through the secretive world of intelligence operations and the meltdown of the financial markets. And it creates, in Beck DeForde, an unforgettable heroine for our turbulent age.<span class="h1">
A Q&A with Stephen L. Carter</span><span class="ptBrand"></span>
Question: Jericho's Fall is a departure from your previous novels. What made you decide to turn your attention to a spy thriller?Stephen L. Carter: I was ready for a change of pace. My other novels have been large—as the reviewers like to say, multi-layered. I wanted to try a short, straightforward page turner, a book to be read for the sheer pleasure of the story. Thrillers are fun to read, and, as I discovered, they are also lots of fun to write. If readers like Jericho's Fall, I expect I will write more of them.
Question: In your "Author's Note" you write that "the problem of mental illness among intelligence professionals is often said to be endemic." This link between intelligence work and madness is certainly born out in your character Jericho Ainsley. Why do you think this link exists and is this what drew you to Jericho's story?
Stephen L. Carter: In researching my previous novel, Palace Council, I became fascinated by the problem of mental illness in the intelligence community, an issue much-commented on in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly because of James Jesus Angleton, whose paranoia when he ran counter-intelligence at the CIA nearly tore the place apart. I thought that structuring a story around an ex-spy who was losing his mind might provide a nice hook, and the rest just followed.
Question: Jericho is former Director of the CIA, former Secretary of Defense, former White House National Security Advisor ("former everything" as you refer to him). You seem equally interested in how his career affected not only him but his family and in particular his ex-lover Rebecca DeForde ("Beck"). Why did you decide to make Beck the center of the story?
Stephen L. Carter: My first novel, The Emperor of Ocean Park, dealt in part with what happens to the family of a man who is embittered after losing a tough confirmation battle for the Supreme Court. Here, I thought about the men in public life who have been brought down (or nearly brought down) by their relationships with women. We always find out what happened to the men, but rarely what happened to the women. In Beck DeForde, I wrote a character who was once "the other woman" to a famous man, and has had to rebuild her life after their tempestuous relationship ended. The idea of drawing her into the conspiratorial web surrounding her ex-lover was irresistible.
Question: Have you always been fascinated with the idea of spies and secrets?
Stephen L. Carter: It is not spying itself that interests me, it is the people who do it. I have done some reading about the toll that intelligence work takes on families, and here I have tried to imagine it fictionally.
As to secrets, I teach a course at Yale Law School on secrets and the law. We build powerful walls to keep secrets, and most of them are probably not worth keeping. Those that are, sooner or later tend to leak through the wall. No doubt there are some secrets that should be kept, but classification and national security tempt those in power to keep in the darkness acts and words that should be dragged into the light. One rule of thumb I wish all officials would follow is this: Don't do anything you're not willing to defend in your memoirs.
Question: What sort of research did this novel require? Did you have to investigate the history of the CIA? What it's like to work in the intelligence community? Interrogation techniques? Did your research into the intelligence community unearth any surprises?
Stephen L. Carter: I did a lot of research about the CIA, its history, its structure, its personalities, as well as about various mental illnesses. One thing that struck me was how much mental illness there has been, historically, near the top of the Agency. I mentioned Angleton. Frank Wisner, the father of the clandestine services, had a nervous breakdown while on the job. There are other, smaller stories, as well.
Stephen L. Carter: The CIA has had its share of financial scandals, but the larger problem, I think, is the way that people parlay government service into multi-million dollar stints lobbying and litigating against the very agencies they used to run. Such conduct is not, nor should it be, illegal; but it does not look good either.
Question: Can people who dedicate their lives to keeping secrets and trading in conspiracies, ever really retire from that kind of work?
Stephen L. Carter: Of course one can retire, but this line of work has to have a lasting effect. If you live your life not talking about your work, it can be difficult to settle into a life where you can talk about everything. And people who have been on the inside often suffer when forced to sit on the outside instead.
Question: Jericho's Fall is set mainly in a small town in the Colorado Rockies. How and why did you choose this particular setting for the novel?
Stephen L. Carter: I have spent a lot of time in the Colorado Rockies over the past thirty years, and it is a region of the country I dearly love. There are, moreover, many places in the mountains where cell phone service is iffy or non-existence. Being cut off from the outside world is of course red meat to the thriller writer...
Question: Jericho's house, Stone Heights, is itself a character in this novel, one with its own secrets and surprises. It harks back to such stories as Wuthering Heights or Rebecca or an Agatha Christie mystery where the physical setting is as much a character as the people. Did you have any of those stories in mind as you wrote this?
Stephen L. Carter: Oh, yes. I remember reading Thomas Hardy as a teenager, and being fascinated by the way that the house or the pond or the moor was always brooding over the action. Here, I had in effect two "physical" characters, the house itself, and the mountains that surround both Stone Heights and the town of Bethel. By the way, the town of Bethel is fictitious, but of course bears a biblical relation to Jericho.
Question: In your previous books characters from earlier novels have gone on to appear in future novels. Will we see more of any of the characters from this novel?
Stephen L. Carter: If I keep writing short thrillers like this one, we will certainly see some of these characters again. By the way, one of the minor characters in Jericho's Fall, a law professor named Tish Kirschbaum, was also a minor character in The Emperor of Ocean Park. So I have kept the connections going.
(Photo © Elena Seibert)
]]>Stephen Carter examines why the virtue of integrity holds such sway over the American political imagination. By weaving together insights from philosophy, theology, history and law, along with examples drawn from current events and a dose of personal experience, Carter offers a vision of integrity that has implications for everything from marriage and politics to professional football. He discusses the difficulties involved in trying to legislate integrity as well as the possibilities for teaching it.
As the Cleveland Plain Dealer said, "In a measured and sensible voice, Carter attempts to document some of the paradoxes and pathologies that result from pervasive ethical realism... If the modern drift into relativism has left us in a cultural and political morass, Carter suggests that the assumption of personal integrity is the way out."
]]>Why do people show poorer manners today than in previous ages? How did we come to confuse rudeness with self-expression and acting on our "rights"? Carter looks at these and other important questions with a combination of his personal experiences and an extremely long shelf of reading material, all the while maintaining an informal writing style that continually--but politely--engages the reader, inviting him or her to think about these issues along with Carter.
There are important messages here about generosity and trust, about respecting diversity and dissent, and about resolving conflict through dialogue rather than mandate. Stephen Carter would never be so uncivil as to demand your attention, but Civility most definitely compels.
]]>Working from the text of the Declaration of Independence, Carter proposes that the true measure of a democracy can be found in its treatment of those citizens who dissent with its stated values. This has been especially important in the consideration of those who disagree with the local or federal government on moral grounds rooted in religious belief; in this century alone, that has been a factor in issues ranging from pacifist activism against World War I, the nonviolent civil rights movement of the 1960s, and the continuing debate over abortion rights. It is also relevant today with regard to such issues as the provision of government funds for private (usually religious) schools. Carter reminds us that the purpose of democracy is not to impose one set of values on a diverse citizenry, but to create a space for dialogue among people of varying value systems, each of which is accorded respect and dignity.
]]>