Palace Council by Stephen L. Carter

The Barnes & Noble Review

Like all ambitious conspiracy theorists, Stephen L. Carter is determined to graft his tale of dark secrets to the grand events of history. And the period over which Palace Council unfolds -- from the early 1950s until the Watergate scandal's dingy twilight -- provides rich material for the conspiracy-minded. Carter's third capacious thriller offers a protagonist who promises to make the most of this territory: Eddie Wesley, a young black writer of upright parentage who arrives in Harlem in 1954. Over the next 20 years he makes his reputation covering many of the era's landmark events for big-name magazines and weaving its turbulent social currents into several novels. Much like the Johnny-on-the-spot devil in that Rolling Stones song, it's the nature of Eddie's game to turn up wherever something big is afoot.

He's approached by real-life Soviet spy Rudolf Abel and pressured by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to become a snitch. He's at the Cape Cod meeting in 1959 where John F. Kennedy persuades key supporters that he can win the presidency, and Eddie briefly writes speeches for Kennedy after the election. He exposes a CIA program of torture and murder in war-torn Vietnam and attends the final, chaotic convention of the SDS in Chicago in 1969. He's at Richard Nixon's side at Camp David after two key aides resign. He pals around with Langston Hughes and has an audience with Joseph Kennedy. In short, Eddie is a man of his times, many times over.

And then there's the conspiracy: In the book's opening pages, Eddie discovers a corpse. A couple of years later, his beloved sister Junie, a Harvard-educated radical, disappears on a road trip. As he pursues his youthful love, Aurelia, in and out of her marriage to another man, the two of them struggle to unravel a plot that connects his missing sister and the dead body, as well as several other mysterious deaths, to a secret organization composed of both black and white powerbrokers who have plans of their own about how they'll shape the times as they are a-changin'.

Palace Council is a Carter mystery, and so all of this isn't so unwieldy as it sounds. Carter excels at complexity. A Yale law professor who turned his hand to fiction several years ago, his popular novels The Emperor of Ocean Park and New England White attracted readers fascinated by tales of upper-class, inner-circle blacks. He has the eye of a social critic, and offers entrée to a world, with its own protocols and pitfalls, that isn't widely known or understood. (Readers of his previous novels will encounter those characters’ forebears or childhood selves here.)

In Eddie, Carter has created a useful proxy, an observer caught up in history as it unfolds and yet apart from it. Eddie's status as a writer affords him the social and political fluidity to turn his lens wherever Carter wants to look, and sometimes what comes into focus feels telling and true. (In one episode, Eddie pens a piece for The Nation characterizing Nixon as "all-American" because his win-at-all-costs scheming embodies the true national ethos, and finds himself reviled by those on the right, who get his point with "crystal clarity," as well as by leftists who misinterpret him as a conservative). More often, though, Carter isn't able to wring much more from the common property of history than the already familiar: Hoover is unpleasant and looks like a bulldog, JFK wants to do the right thing, Nixon is underhanded but vulnerable.

The book opens on the Harlem salon society of the late '50s and early '60s (which Carter shifted forward in time by at least a decade), where matrons dubbed "the Czarinas" ran the show, and those who got off the A train were judged according to their stops -- the low-rent Valley dwellers debarking at 125th Street, the residents of exclusive Sugar Hill at 145th or 155th. It's fascinating real estate, but it disappears quickly from view and nothing as vivid takes its place. Eddie is shuttled from one historic overlook to the next, and neither he nor Carter has the chance to take full stock of where he is.

Occasionally big events are filtered convincingly through the eyes of Carter's characters, as when Aurelia attends a gathering to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon: "Everybody wanted to be cool and cynical, even to mumble about how the money that went into Project Apollo could have been better spent feeding the hungry, but nobody wanted to miss it." Unfortunately, the florid and unimaginative language into which Carter can lapse sounds even worse when applied to public figures. The night Eddie meets Nixon at Camp David, for instance, "was achingly cold, but the cauldron of boiling emotion that constituted Nixon, like the similar simmer deep inside Eddie, generated all the warmth he needed." Overheated prose, indeed.

It is Eddie's obsession with finding his sister, and his thwarted-but-never-dead romance with Aurelia, that keeps us reading. But as the plot threads through protests, presidencies, and war, it loses its way so many times that, by the end, the resolution has lost much of its urgency, and the obscure machinations of the villain never take hold of our imagination the way they're meant to. History has gotten in the way. Carter's note at the end of the book ticks off any number of ways that he had to "fuss" with real events to make them conform to his narrative. That's the trouble with grand conspiracies. --Sarah L. Courteau

Sarah L. Courteau is literary editor of The Wilson Quarterly.

From the Publisher

Bestselling author Stephen L. Carter delivers a gripping political thriller set against the backdrop of Watergate, Vietnam, and the Nixon White House.

Philmont Castle is a man who has it all: wealth, respect, and connections. He's the last person you'd expect to fall prey to a murderer, but then his body is found on the grounds of a Harlem mansion by the young writer Eddie Wesley, who along with the woman he loves, Aurelia Treene, is pulled into a twenty-year search for the truth. The disappearance of Eddie's sister June makes their investigation even more troubling. 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 and President Nixon himself.

Publishers Weekly

Dominic Hoffman's voice possesses a touch of sandpaper that causes every word to be rubbed raw before emerging from between his lips. The hardboiled sensation is appropriate for law professor and novelist Carter's suspenseful story of secret societies, political intrigue, and the social swirl of Harlem's 1950s elite. Eddie Wesley, a writer and member of African-American high society, finds himself thrust into a shadowy world of murder and espionage, forced to use his authorial skills to uncover the truth. Hoffman's occasional forays into doing voices, like those of Vietnamese police officers, are unfortunate, but the grain of his voice is alluring enough that listeners will want him to just keep going. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, May 19).(Aug.)

David Keymer - Library Journal

A Wall Street lawyer is recruited into a mysterious conspiracy. Two and a half years later, a young writer stumbles over the lawyer's corpse in Harlem; an unexplained suicide follows. The writer's sister vanishes. The writer sets out to connect these seemingly unconnected events; his quest takes him through the tumultuous 1950s and 1960s. In his previous novels (New England White; The Emperor of Ocean Park), Yale law professor Carter has delighted in bending genres. His latest is no exception, at once a hyperbolic thriller and a subtle and convincing comedy of manners. Lives intersect across 20 years in ways both obvious and hidden: Richard Nixon appears as a strangely sympathetic figure, and poet Langston Hughes, Joe and Jack Kennedy, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, and J. Edgar Hoover take bows. Few authors are better than Carter at capturing the nuances of human behavior on both sides of the color line. His take on race relations isn't bleak, but Carter is no Pollyanna: there's still a long way to go by the end of this book. Council will grip readers, but it will also make them think. Enthusiastically recommended for all general collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ3/1/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

A brilliant black writer's harsh education in reality, a search for a lost sibling and the history of "a radical organization [created] to scare white America" are the primary ingredients of the third bulky thriller from Carter (Law/Yale; New England White, 2007, etc.). The serpentine plot spans two decades of the previous century's history, beginning in 1954 when recent Amherst graduate and semi-willing tool of Harlem crime bosses Eddie Wesley stumbles onto the body of a murdered black attorney, and into a whirlwind of intrigue that's gradually linked to the title organization, a shadowy cabal that exploits and endangers even its most hopeful and idealistic members. Eddie seeks answers from the woman he loved and lost to another man, a parade of mentors and exemplars (including prominent authors Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison), even the Javert-like FBI agent who keeps him under constant surveillance. Another major plot strand commits Eddie to seek his disappeared younger sister Junie, rumored to have become a kingpin (queenpin?) in the violent leftist organization Jewel Agony. All this and much more (including a pattern of ominously meaningful Milton quotations) occurs as Eddie himself, established as a successful and respected novelist, shifts his focus to politics and becomes an insider in the Kennedy administration, then "a journalist for a radical monthly" and a seasoned observer of events that lead inexorably to the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the looming resignation of (a surprisingly sympathetically portrayed) President Richard Nixon. The latter is only one of several luminaries and villains who make memorable appearances, among them JFK, J. Edgar Hoover and BarbraStreisand. There are arguably too many barely distinguishable scenes in which Eddie is abducted, interrogated, threatened or tortured. But Carter keeps the pot boiling energetically, and surprises leap out until this very long (but never dull) novel's penultimate page. The so-called masters of the genre could learn something from Carter's intoxicating blend of political street smarts and literary skill. This is Grade-A entertainment. First printing of 125,000

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Reading Group Guide

1. Carter writes, “The social distinctions mattered little to the great mass of Negroes, but Eddie had been raised, in spite of himself, to an awareness of who was who” [p. 16]. How does Eddie's father's position in the community, as well as his own experiences at a prestigious college and graduate school, influence Eddie's self-perception and his ambition? Do his experiences working for Scarlett and in various low-paying jobs affect his outlook and his understanding of (and sympathy with) the lives of “the great mass of Negroes”?

2. Despite the claims made by others, “Eddie did not consider his short story revolutionary. He did not consider it anything, except finished” [p. 15]. What does this show about the way Eddie thinks of himself as a writer? Is he naïve? Self-serving? Does his view of the role of a writer change in the course of the novel?

3. What does Aurelia's approach to her career and marriage reveal about the things that matter to her? Do her ambitions justify her rejection of Wesley [p. 16]? Does the information about her that emerges later in the novel help explain the opinions she voices and the decisions she makes? In what ways is she a typical example of many smart, well-educated, upper-middle class women during the period in which the novel is set?

4. Palace Council covers the vast changes in American politics and society between 1954 and 1974 through the lives of individuals. Discuss how the following characters contribute to the broad and complex picture Carter draws: Edward Wesley Senior; Gary Fatek; Perry Mount; Matthew and Kevin Garland; Benjamin Mellor.

5. Eddie is subjected to extremepsychological and physical intimidation throughout the novel. What do the threats from Hoover and his henchman show about the way power operates in Washington [pp. 100–101]? What do Eddie's experiences in Saigon [pp. 319–325] and his horrific kidnapping in Hong Kong [pp. 368–372] demonstrate about the acceptance of extreme measures to achieve a goal? Do the differing perceptions—and mutual suspicions—of opposing political groups or interests inevitably encourage extremism?

6. John Milton's Paradise Lost holds the keys to the nature and scope of “The Project.” How does the great epic poem about the battle between God and Satan illuminate the moral themes of Palace Council? Milton's purpose was to “justify the ways of God to man.” Is there a parallel theme or “purpose” underlying Palace Council? To what extent do the characters embody the ideas of good and evil that are at the heart of Paradise Lost and of traditional Christian belief?

7. Aurelia asks herself, “Why did the group identify so completely with Satan, who is doomed to defeat?” [p. 346]. What answers does the novel provide?

8. In his celebrated essay “The American Angle,” Eddie identified the qualities that define the country in 1967 and concluded, “If America failed to change the angle from which it looked at life . . . then the nation was at a moral dead end” [p. 313]. Are these still the salient characteristics of our politics and our culture? In your opinion, has the situation improved or deteriorated over the last forty years?

9. Many of the secrets the characters keep from one another reflect the need (or desire) to protect both their public roles and their private lives. To what extent are they driven by a sense of loyalty—to their families, their causes, their ideals? What does this show about the relationship between individual and social responsibility?

10. In describing his novel and the people in it, Carter said, “Human motive and human weakness interest me, and politics happens to highlight those weaknesses” [Vintage interview]. What does the Council and its convoluted history reveal about the motives that drive people to commit themselves to a radical course of action? Do you think the kind of conspiracy Carter describes is possible?

11. Throughout the book, Carter imagines the conversations of prominent people like J. Edgar Hoover [pp. 93–99], Joseph Kennedy [pp. 132–135], and Richard Nixon [pp. 463–469]. Discuss the “legitimacy” of putting words into the mouths of real people. Do their voices conform to your impressions of them? Does Carter capture both the tone and the content of their thoughts in a realistic way or does he distort or exaggerate them to make them relevant to the fictional narrative?

12. Were you familiar with the larger history that forms the background to the novel? Did you discover things you hadn't known before? Are specific events adequately explained and put into context? In the author's note, Carter writes, “I chose to fiddle a bit with history. My only excuse, other than the needs of the narrative, is that I have tried to reorder the decades in a way that does honor to my subjects.” [p. 514]. Does a novelist have an implicit obligation to present an accurate record of the times he is portraying? Do the modifications Carter describes enrich the depth and impact of the book?

13. If you came to Palace Council with prior knowledge of Empyreals from reading Carter's previous novels, did you find yourself using that knowledge as you read? Were the recurrent characters (the Garlands, Aurelia, and Mona Veazie, for example) consistent with your recollections of them? Did this prequel inspire you to read (or reread) Carter's other books?

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