More than two decades after its publication, “The Emperor of Ocean Park” — Stephen L. Carter’s iconic 2002 political thriller about the death of a controversial Black judge — came to the small screen. Starring Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker, the MGM+ adaptation Emperor of Ocean Park debuted earlier this year.
While the limited series was beautifully cast and mostly faithful plot-wise, it’s primarily a soapy, slow-burning thriller that lacks the depth on race and politics that made the bestselling novel so special.
Carter’s work was (and remains today) a thought-provoking, sharply observed narrative about the lives and struggles of Black elites. This multilayered social commentary earned the Yale Law School professor an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, recognizing books that “have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human cultures.”
Carter’s premise for “The Emperor of Ocean Park” is sensational, to say the least. Oliver Garland was once one of the brightest and most celebrated stars of the conservative legal establishment, whose appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court was all but guaranteed. However, after bruising confirmation hearings unearthed longstanding ties to one of the most infamous and wealthy criminals in the nation, Garland’s career went into freefall. With his legal ambitions all but over, Garland reinvented himself as an aggrieved, hard-right talk-show firebrand. Years later, when the scandalous former jurist dies suddenly, dangerous men approach his son, law professor Talcott Garland, demanding information from his late father mysteriously dubbed “the arrangements.”
Much of this plot is a thinly veiled callback to true-to-life Supreme Court controversies from the 1980s and 1990s, including failed Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork and still-sitting Justice Clarence Thomas, whose nomination and appointment survived fierce challenges concerning his ethics and extremist views.
Many praised “The Emperor of Ocean Park” upon its publication for being smart about obsessions like court politics, interracial and intra-racial struggles, and the alienation of Black conservatives. Nearly all of those observations hold up in present day outside of some of the novel’s language (for instance, Talcott’s descriptions of Black and White people as members of “the darker nation” and of “the paler nation,” respectively).
Despite its anachronisms, “The Emperor of Ocean Park” remains eerily prescient. The conflicts of race, class, and other identity challenges which plague the Garland family persist in our lives to this day.
Carter is a fine-tuned social observer who paints a vivid picture of the minutiae of color and class conflict. It helps that Carter is writing about a territory he knows both as a scholar and member of a prominent and incredibly accomplished Black family. One could rip the plotlines about the peddling of political influence from headlines printed years after the book went to press.
Carter ensures readers understand what makes his character Oliver Garland tick, and the toll his life (and death) has on his family. Each of Garland’s three adult children has their own difficulties with the fallen patriarch — elder son Addison disdains the judge’s politics; Mariah chafed under the late great Garland’s expectations for feminine accomplishments; and Talcott feels like the less loved, less talented one of the storied clan. Regardless of the pain he had caused, to his family and his fans, Judge Garland remained a respected figure who was unfairly maligned for being a politically conservative Black man and because of ostensibly innocent associations.
Throughout, Talcott’s ruminations on the insular Black elite spaces he grew up in are also eye-opening. As the novel’s protagonist, Talcott provides a thorough view into Black bourgeois American life that few outsiders are privy to.
Though born into the Black elite, Talcott has never quite felt comfortable in his skin or valued by his community. Being more of an onlooker than a participant makes for an uncomfortable life but offers the perfect vantage point for storytelling. Told in the first person, the narrative is both sympathetic to Talcott’s struggles and unflinching in tracing his weaknesses. A somewhat conservative, yet ideologically heterodox middle-aged Black man, Talcott’s life is rife with contradiction. He’s soft yet prone to anger; aspires to racial color blindness yet frequently burns with righteous racial resentment. He’s a keen social observer but clings to a marriage that doesn’t serve him. He bristles at the social divisions of class and color within Black communities, yet lives his life fully ensconced within those circles.
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Through Talcott’s interactions with the people who knew his father best and some who had conflicts with him, the novel offers sharp, multilayered commentary on the role of race in both interpersonal and professional relationships. Talcott is painfully aware that his strict, Black elite upbringing and carefully cultivated, shaved-down race-neutral edges make him somewhat of an outsider everywhere. In White spaces, he’s forced to the margins despite his impressive credentials. However, he’s awkward within Black spaces where he should belong. He feels resentment and red fury wash over him in reaction to racial aggressions large and small, at work and home. He resents his wealthy White brother-in-law Howard’s confidence and ability to command the center of attention in Black spaces where Blackness should be favored, “somehow perfectly in place in spite of his whiteness…”
Seeing that Howard is “able to exercise the same power” as their father at the pinnacle of his influence over Black family and friends triggers a visceral rage within Talcott as a Black man.
When Talcott thinks about how his father might have wielded his weight on the Supreme Court and been judged for it compared to his former White colleague, Judge Wallace Wainwright, he concludes: “After all the painful centuries, there is still a gap, a gulf, a yawning chasm between the smugness of a successful white man and the smugness of a successful black man. I suppose that white folk must find the first far easier to bear. Not black folk, however. Not this one, at least.”
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