Special thriller section: 'Palace Council'
By Clayton Moore, Special to the Rocky
Published July 10, 2008 at 7 p.m.
* Fiction. By Stephen L. Carter. Knopf, $26.95. Grade: C
Plot in a nutshell: Multidecade historicals are a neat trick, but this overstuffed thriller by Carter swings for the rafters and misses. Carter approaches the past with unbearable grandiosity, crafting a messy alternate universe to prop up the plot's main conceit and feed its brooding ruminations.
"Had Eddie Wesley been a less reliable man, he would have never stumbled over the body, chased Junie to Tennessee, battled the devils to a draw, and helped to topple a president," writes Carter in the first line of Chapter 1. Having given away the plot, he then drowns it in the telling.
Opening in 1954, the book offers disparate viewpoints from gifted black writer Eddie and from Aurelia, "his unattainably highborn girlfriend," who part ways early. Sulking, Eddie earns fame for a story that uses the phrase "darker nation" to inspire racial solidarity.
Inspiration strikes again when Eddie discovers the body of white attorney Philmont Castle garroted in Harlem. Captivated by Castle's connections to a traitorous atomic scientist, Eddie writes the sinister events into a novel, cementing his literary rep but also his place in a convoluted conspiracy involving his disappeared sister, Junie. Meanwhile, Aurelia marries investment banker Kevin Garland, a man with a primary role in a secret plan to secure racial justice in America.
Along the way, Carter drops famous historical names with abandon, bends history to serve his story and slogs through three decades of racial strife as Eddie, Junie and Aurelia orbit around the scheme launched by the mythic Palace Council.
Sample of prose: "You might succeed in killing me. You might succeed in persuading the country that a group of successful black men from Harlem has been secretly running the world. And the pogrom that would follow would then be on your head."
Pros: Carter's ambitious, serpentine plot knits together revolutionary groups, the civil rights movement, McCarthyism and Watergate.
Cons: Carter's writing is dull, period. James Ellroy already barreled down this road in American Tabloid, and other writers (see Walter Mosley) have better insights into race in postwar America.
Final word: Bypass this Palace and wait for the inevitable movie.
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