NEW ENGLAND WHITE
Stephen L. Carter
Vintage
Fiction
Hardcover: 0375413626
Paperback: 9780375712913

Lemaster Carlyle is a Barbadian immigrant, a devout High Anglican and an Ivy-League graduate who now heads up the university he attended. In the hands of a lesser novelist than Stephen L. Carter (in whose THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK the Carlyles first appeared, as minor characters), Lemaster might easily deteriorate into a quirk-riddled shallow caricature.

Fortunately, Carter does not allow Lemaster to seem silly (just the opposite, in fact). That’s important, because we need to understand what his wife Julia is up against when she realizes that the murdered man (who was once her lover) she and her husband find one snowy night knew a few things about her husband’s college roommates, two of whom are now a powerful senator and the current U.S. president.

Julia Carlyle --- First Lady of the administration, mother of four, associate dean at the divinity school and daughter of a fascinating and upper-class Harlem dynasty --- finds herself embroiled in a complicated mystery for reasons relating to all of her roles and identities. Living in “the heart of whiteness” as they do, the Carlyles have adopted many mores and manners of the white upper-class by which they are surrounded, including leaving the urban university city of Elm Harbor for the tony village of TK Landing, where their pretentious new McMansion raises eyebrows on both sides of the racial divide.

But as Julia tries to figure out what dead economics Professor Kellen Zant meant by the “surplus” he left behind (his clues all involve mirrors, Julia’s preferred collectible), she comes to understand that living in “the heart of whiteness” does not confer a white heart. If she is to save her troubled teenaged daughter, trust in her husband of two decades and be true to her own soul, Julia will have to come to terms with her own past and find a new future path.

This sounds like a lot, and it is. However, Carter loops and twists his plotlines and character development so deftly that the reader never feels manipulated (as in some clue-dense mystery novels) but rather led, just as during a first-class university lecture. (If you didn’t already know that Carter is a law professor at Yale, you’d figure it out by the end.) Sometimes the leading is a little too slow or a bit too stuffy or both --- but as you watch the strands of the plot fuse into a first-class detective story, ultimately you don’t mind.

    --- Reviewed by Bethanne Kelly Patrick

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