Race, power and intrigue in "New England White"

Stephen L. Carter's second novel unfurls like a long, long carpet.

The prospect of its deliberate pace and twisty plot (filling nearly 600 pages) may scare off some fiction seekers, but it's also true that these same qualities make "New England White" a satisfying immersion experience. The reader, once hooked, stays in a luxuriously absorbed state until the last page.

Carter, a Yale Law School professor and respected writer on affirmative action, church-state separation and other legal-cultural topics, made big waves with his similarly sprawling first novel, "The Emperor of Ocean Park." It, too, surveys a particular niche of what his narrators term the "darker nation."

In "The Emperor," a multi-generational cast of upper-middle-class African Americans react to the mysterious death of a formidable patriarch. The mystery angle was more practical vehicle than true suspense; an excuse to get inside the complexities of family relationships, as well as explore an intricate black society under the radar of outsiders.

"New England White" uses the same formula — with a few casual characters from his first novel returning as prime players. This time Carter attempts to place the mystery more centrally. But his characters' inner journeys again trump the thriller-plot, which has clues and twists so numerous that halfway through one gives up on whodunit and, if wise, settles in to enjoy whothunkit.

Carter's characters are intelligent, ambitious, acutely observant; often conflicted around issues of race when dealing with the "paler nation," as well as other people of color. "New England White" is set in an insular WASP-y university town, the ideal stage for the intrigue and issues that come to bear.

The story opens on a snowy night when Lemaster Carlyle, new president of the institution, and his wife, Julia Carlyle, a dean of the university's divinity school, stumble upon a corpse. The dead man is Kellen Zant, renowned economist and womanizer, who long ago loved and wounded Julia.

Julia becomes the focal point as she tracks down clues to Zant's death, multi-tasking at a level that any executive would envy. She does her risky sleuthing while skirting the threat of a scandalous back story that involves her husband and goes all the way to the White House. She's also caring for a brilliant, troubled daughter, fending off irritating meddlers and facing down a tenacious campus-security chief.

Yet Lemaster is the more interesting of the couple, perhaps because he is so sure of who he is. Carter creates the proud, ravenously ambitious and judgmental man with skill. Julia frequently finds herself admitting her husband's mental prowess, even as he exhausts her by holding forth on life's knottier questions:

"The problem, he told Julia as they readied for bed, was that people want a God small enough to fit in their hip pockets, to be pulled out only when necessary to gain a secular advantage ... No wonder no one goes to church anymore. Why worship a Being that insignificant?"

Some critics have compared Carter to Henry James, understandable given James' preservation of certain 19th-century social strata, but off the mark. The New York Times Book Review opined that Carter might be the black middle-class version of Theodore Dreiser, early 20th-century novelist and shrewd commentator on class divisions. Carter isn't Dreiser either; not grim enough and too Christian.

What Carter does share with both artists is the highly readable means to acquaint us with the multifarious neighbors we inexplicably cannot seem to meet on our own.

Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett is a writer living in Portland.