CARTER’S BANK SHOT Stephen L. Carter is a well-known Yale law professor, African-American moderate, and author of such books as “The Culture of Disbelief.” He’s also written a new mystery/thriller called “The Emperor of Ocean Park” (Knopf, 657, $26.95). Carter is used to receiving flattering praise, and it’s got to be a shock for him to read the first reviews now coming in. The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani declared Carter’s “thrilleresque narrative convolutions” are “so clich d and bogus that they verge perilously close to parody.” David Gates in Newsweek howled that the book “is hung about with kick-me signs that betray the amateur.” The only real mystery in this mystery tale, Gates concluded, is why Knopf paid Carter a $4.2 million advance. This is where we get down to the problem. “The Emperor of Ocean Park” isn’t what anyone would call a great book. It could stand being cut in half, the plot could use serious doctoring, and its prose could take some touch-up work. But that’s all about par for mystery/thrillers–try running a little highbrow criticism over a Tom Clancy or a Robert Ludlum novel, for example. What’s got the book world worked up is that Carter got so much money for this first effort. It does seem a little extravagant, but if it sells, he’ll get as much for the next one. BOOKS IN BRIEF C.L.R. James A Life by Farrukh Dhondy Pantheon, 304 pp., $24 Unless you were a Trotskyite or are interested in the sport of cricket, this confusing and amateurishly produced biography of a Trinidadian intellectual may not be to your taste. Still, I found the story of Cyril Lionel Robert James fascinating. An anti-colonialist Trotskyite cricketer who preferred Britain to his native Trinidad, James (who died in 1989 at the age of 88) was a multi-faceted West Indian personality: historian, philosopher, black liberationist, novelist, literary critic, political activist, Anglophile, Bardolater, and much-married womanizer. He opposed black nationalism, black separatism, and, above all, Stalinism–predicting in 1983 that the Polish revolt begun in Gdansk “would end in Leningrad and Moscow.” By then, of course, he had long given up his Trotskyite creed, although not his Marxism. But James’s Trotskyite past (he broke away in the early 1950s) got him into trouble during the McCarthy era, when “World Revolution,” a book he wrote in his Trotskyite interlude, was defined as subversive. Having lived in America since 1938, long overstaying his visa, James was deported. During a six-month stay on Ellis Island in 1953, he wrote a long essay on Herman Melville called “Mariners, Renegades and Castaways.” In “Moby-Dick” James found, writes Dhondy, “the great allegory for America itself, for the reign of capitalism in its final stage of totalitarian obsession.” After literature, James’s real passion was cricket, a game that for him was as much allegory as sport. As a cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, James once compared cricket to the ancient Greeks’ Olympics. As the Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott put it, James loved cricket “not because it is a sport but because he has found in it all the decencies required for a culture.” Why James became a Trotskyite revolutionary remains something of a mystery, even to his biographer. James was everything a would-be leader of workers and sharecroppers should not have been. He loved American movies, to which his “Moby-Dick” verdict apparently did not apply. According to Dhondy, James “fell for the drama of ‘Gone with the Wind.'” True, as an intellectual, he dutifully wrote about Sergei Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin as representatives of “the new art forms of the century. But in his heart he wasn’t for Eisenstein at all. He was for Clark Gable.” When James advised a London assembly of black activists in the 1980s to see an art-house revival of D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation,” members of his audience objected, saying the film was racist and glorified the Ku Klux Klan. James replied–rather cynically–“I would recommend you go see it in the morning and picket in the afternoon.” –Arnold Beichman
