Rating: 
Summary: insomniacs delight
Review: What a lot of long-winded, stream-of-consciousness, plot- destroying, self-indulgent drivel. Other reviewers have suggested that the Editor is to blame - but I cannot even imagine an editor who would have agreed to edit this book. Edit it properly and it becomes a pamphlet. Buy at your peril - unless you are a chronic insomniac.
Rating: 
Summary: Pedantic, self-pitying, infuriatingly long book
Review: This book and the main character are both so irritating that it is difficult to know where to begin. I wanted to smack Professor Garland and say "Be a man!". Instead he is a sniveling whiner. I sincerely hope this book is not autobiographical. The chip on this man's shoulder is more like the Rock of Gibralter!I agree with the reviews that say this book needed heavy editing. His descriptions are sooooooo long and tedious that I eventually found myself skipping over entire paragraphs. It is very difficult to warm up to a novel that has few, if any, really likable characters. To Professors Carter I give one piece of good advice - Don't give up your day job.
Rating: 
Summary: Perfect summer novel
Review: My review will not be as complex as some of the others here; I simply want to congratulate Professor Carter on making such a stunning leap into the realm of fictional writing. I sincerely hope he continues to entertain those of us who bought and greatly enjoyed EMPEROR.
Rating:
Summary: Too many useless characters
Review: It could have been very good if written using fewer characters. I think the whole story could have been accomplished without the brother Addison & cousin Sally--their clues could have easily been assigned to another of the numerous characters. Talcott's child could have made a brief appearance. I still don't know what "dare you" from the 3 year old was supposed to mean but having the kid throughout the book was boring. He could have cut down on some of the Law school fellow professors too. I lost track of the different professor's personalities after awhile. I agree with one reviewer who called it Harry Potter for grownups. I'd read another Carter novel--if there ever is one with the hope that it is a little less drawn out.
Rating: 
Summary: Ponderous
Review: Ponderous,a good story that would have been a lot better if Stephen L. Carter reduced the 657 pages to 400 (easy in this case). Carter goes out of his way to try to impress me with his vocabulary. Is the "intellectual" bigotry throughout the book espoused by fictional protagonist Tal Garland or really Stephen L. Carter????
Rating:
Summary: Overhyped, boring, unbelieveable!
Review: I so wanted to love this book. I found all the poitical proselytizing so boring and repetitive. The dinner party and lunch scenes were particularly unbearable and there was not a likeable character in the whole book...
Rating:
Summary: The Emperor of Ocean Park
Review: The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Stephen L. Carter, is a rare modern book, that offers a glimpse into the black elite; a university law school; and a complex multi-generational family. The plot twists and turns between events, clues, false leads, suspects, allies, and bystanders. The hero, Talcott Garland's quest is to unravel a mystery left behind after the death of his difficult father. His quest strips him of his illusions and comforts in life, and forces him to confront the dark past of his father and a network of family, friends, and political and judicial luminaries. A great read for anyone who loves multi-threaded mysteries, and intelligent, articulate characters.
Rating: 
Summary: The New DuBoisian Dilemma
Review: The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter. is a quite compelling if not evenly flowing or artistic read. It's an ambitious book that works on many different levels. As a first time novelist, Carter should have stuck to one or two, but in the end you are glad that he didn't. As a thriller, it bites you slo-o-o-wly. I get the feeling that if Carter weren't so interested in putting us in his protagonist's stubborn and provincial shoes, we might figure out exactly what is going to happen next. Of course you cannot guess because the twists and surprises go for almost 650 pages. The thriller could have been shortened by half. But if we were to do that, we would have had to make the protagonist less harried and more intrigued. Talcott Garland is not intrigued, he is haunted by being the scion of a legendary judge and patriarch who has set in motion wrecking ball from the grave aimed directly at his upper middle-class life. Carter is not content to trace the trajectory of this wrecking ball as it crashes through the many windows and wall of Garland's complicated life - no that would be a thriller. Rather he draws out the contemplations of a man who may by his actions and reactions to the threats of this wrecking ball, may be going insane, or who may be becoming a hero. And since Talcott Garland is a member of the darker nation, Carter has reinscribed a new class of Negroes into the duBoisian dilemma of dual consciousness. What's so thrilling about that? What's thrilling about it is that this is certainly what Carter must know he is doing. And as we like to say in the black upper middle class, 'this sets us back 100 years'. But that's just one angle on this story and I'll leave it at that. Carter also injects a healthy dose of his most potent moralizing into the conscience of Talcott Garland who is forever trying to keep his wits and perspective about him. While he is surrounded by a whirlwind of manipulators and players, he tries desperately to play it straight. Talcott Garland has no guile to rely upon which gives him the courage to fight. Yet his abiding faith in his ability to recover the love of his cheating wife alone and finally serve honorably as head of his family pushes him to seek answers to the questions he'd rather not know. Garland comes armed with a host of virtues sown deeply in the ways and means of the talented tenth, but they are supplied not inherently but through his extended family. Each of a dozen family members and friends has a slice of those virtues and each imparts a bit of strength or knowledge upon poor Talcott as he valiantly struggles to unlock the mystery. Furthermore as a story of the times, of the moral mishmash of career ambitions in academia and in Washington, it's a marvelous book that continues his non-fiction scolding by other means. What absolutely floored me was the patience evidenced in the setting of traps by certain characters - there's not much you hear about anything so subtle in any fictional intrigue which has such a long horizon. Instead you hear the reverse, that mistakes made are long hid and only newly discovered by the hounding media or political opposition but that once discovered they are immediately brought to bear. Further, I think Carter does an admirable job of bringing race in and out of focus naturally as the story progresses, which is how it happens in life. It's a very ambitious book and quite a tall order for any writer. As an artist he's not quite up to the task. Although there are a number of gems in the form of page-long paragraphs you can just tell couldn't be dickered with, most of the writing is just writing. His habit of dropping annoying little bomblets of discovery at the very end of his chapters serves the purpose of helping keep parts of Talcott's recognition obscured to the reader, but gets tiresome. But the ending 200 pages makes up for it, given Talcott's final machinations and collaborations. I think the book is a bit chaptery, and it comes as no surprise that he created 64 to coincide with the number of squares on a chessboard, but I would have liked Talcott to be a lot more chess-wise in his thinking. Even having him think "protect the queen" would have been better. Also I think Talcott needed to be frayed a lot more. It would have drawn me in deeper. One never gets the feeling that Talcott's ruination would evoke in him the ugly side of losing one's status, I didn't sense his contempt for his potential lower-class neighbors, or his sense of how he would adapt. Talcott's mushy self-esteem is not a compelling place for a reader, but it does serve the purposes of Carter's moral lecture... Carter's imagery of Martha's Vineyard is not so descriptive so much as evocative for those who already have some emotional resonance with the place. But I found myself riding along on the ferry, gazing of the cliffs at Gay Head and lazily walking the Circuit along with him. The book is fascinating and bears up under different layers of scrutiny. That is what makes it good, and a must read for those of us who have shared, at various points in our life, the muddled consciousness of Talcott Garland.
Rating:
Summary: Superb story teller!
Review: Just finished and thoroughly enjoyed this novel. The novel takes one on a journey through a different side of judicial and legal life. The mystery is lined with details of history. A great new author.
Rating:
Summary: Not a thriller but a sermon (and a long one)
Review: I had high hopes for this novel but couldn't even manage to finish it. I made it through the first third or so, then couldn't take the rambling, plodding prose and lifeless pace anymore. I skimmed ahead to the ending, where I was both disappointed and relieved to see that things never got any better. There's a book in here somewhere -- maybe even two or three -- but it would take a good editor to carve it out. As a mystery, the book spins its wheels from the first chapter. Pages and pages and pages go by where nothing happens. The writer insists on painfully long scenes where a line or two would do. The scenes with the protagonist's son are particularly irritating -- like being forced to listen to a long-winded neighbor intone endlessly about how brilliant and precocious his child is. You will come to hate the words, "Dare you." How could a book with so little action be so long? Maybe because the author never met a setting or a character he couldn't describe to death, and he never misses a chance to preach at the reader about social mores, racial differences, class conflict, morality and other topics. Too often, the reader is *told* what a character's motivation is or how an action should be interpreted. I felt like I was in danger of being explained to death. Show me, don't lecture me, please. If you read this book not as a mystery but as a novel of upper-middle-class black America, it will probably be more fulfilling. I suspect that's where the author's heart lies, and much of the material on the family had sparks of life to it. There are occasional glimpses of interesting characters and smart turns-of-phrase. Which makes the flaws all the more frustrating. Kill your darlings, Faulkner advised. There's quite a bit of murder to be done in this mystery, but unfortunately none of it has to do with the plot.
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