Interview: Author Stephen L Carter

Born in Washington DC in 1954, Stephen L Carter attended public (state) schools in Washington and New York, and earned degrees from Stanford and Yale universities. After clerking on the DC appeals circuit and at the US Supreme Court, he joined the law faculty of Yale University in 1982, where he is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of law. His specialities include constitutional law, and law and religion. His non-fiction books include The Culture of Disbelief, and Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. His novel The Emperor of Ocean Park appeared in 2002; this week Cape publishes New England White. Stephen L Carter lives with his family in New Haven, Connecticut, where he also leads a Scout troop.

Stephen L Carter may be best known as the man who reportedly sold his debut novel for a million-dollar advance. But the 52-year-old American legal scholar ought to be equally famous for publishing the most airtight acknowledgements in US literature. The Emperor of Ocean Park, his 2002 thriller about an African-American judge tarnished by confirmation hearings, ends with a 13-paragraph section that revolves around how not to read the novel. The book was "not a roman-à-clef on Yale University," where Carter teaches, or the "tribulations of middle-class African-American America". It was not even intended to chronicle real-life Washington DC, where Carter grew up. After all, "the downtown branch of Brooks Brothers moved a few years ago" from its location in the novel.

At the offices of his New York publisher, Carter appears to be fighting another lawyerly battle with the forces of literalism. New England White (Jonathan Cape, £17.99) has just earned two trenchant, mostly positive reviews in The New Yorker and the online journal Slate, the latter commenting on Carter's "painfully cynical perspective on American race relations". Carter serves up a disclaimer about ideas in general as they appear in his fiction. "The opinions expressed by my characters are not necessarily my opinions," he says with a grin which disappears as quickly as a man puts away his wallet in a crowded room. "But I try to create characters who are complete enough, so that they have ideas that – whether you agree with them or not – sound natural".

Carter tends to speak this way, in long sentences that fold in on themselves, tucking in shirt-tails and tightening belts as they go. He is tall, wide-eyed, and looks 15 years younger than his author photo depicts him. There is nothing spontaneous or improvised about his delivery. It's hard to blame him for this careful demeanour, however. Still, 53 years after the landmark anti-segregation case "Brown vs the Board of Education", the bitter legacy of slavery and institutional discrimination remain contentious topics, constantly in flux.

New England White, in its own entertaining, page-turning way, turns up similar issues. Like its predecessor, the novel tells the tale of a powerful family of African-Americans living in a mostly white community outside a prestigious New England university. Here Carter brings forward the Carlyles, who appeared in the previous novel, to have their near-perfect tableau shattered. As the book opens, university president Lemaster Carlyle and his wife Julia come upon the body of Professor Kellen Zant while driving home. The hot-shot economist and former fling of Julia's has two bullets in the back of his head. Two forces fight to keep the investigation alive when it is squashed from on high. They are an African-American security chief who struggles with the university bureaucracy, and Julia, so chased by rumours she decides the only way to stop the whispering is to find the killer.

Carter, he would like it to be clear, did not grow up in the upper-class world where the book unfolds. But he is not too distant a cousin. His grandmother, Eunice Hunton Carter, was the first black woman to be a district attorney in the state of New York. His father, Lisle C Carter Jr, was deputy director of the office of economic opportunity in the Johnson and Kennedy administration, and president of the University of Washington DC. Carter grew up in Washington, Harlem, and Ithaca, New York, where his father taught public administration at Cornell. When his family moved during high school, he stayed behind, boarding with a Jewish family - an experience that changed his attitude about faith. He attended Stanford and Yale and clerked for the legendary Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall.

From Marshall, Carter says he learnt to "not let ideology or politics" hem him in. Thus his 1991 literary debut, Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, came in the form of a memoir that criticised the social policy which, he says, was designed to be integral to his achievement. Carter went on to write more than half a dozen other books of non-fiction, on subjects as diverse as the Supreme Court confirmation process and civility in American life. He has been labelled a liberal, a neo-conservative, an evangelical, and everything in between. "When it comes to the world of ideas, I'm like a kid in a candy shop," Carter explains. "I don't think of them as liberal or conservative, I'm just interested in ideas."

As a novelist, Carter has slightly more leeway to go beyond ideas, to describe the experience of being black in America today. "It's striking that even now," Carter says, his speech slowing for oratorical emphasis, "the degree to which if you take a very successful African-American corporate lawyer, investment banker, or corporate executive and you take him alone among other black people of similar attainment, how quickly the conversation so often turns to the slights one has suffered, or the things one can't talk about in certain other atmospheres. And I've tried to illuminate that a little bit in each of these novels – without slowing down the story."

In The Emperor of Ocean Park, Misha, the narrator, was obsessed with these slights; he collected them like a cutter does scars. In New England White, Carter's main protagonist – Julia – is more balanced. She may be stopped from entering public beaches, but she simply doesn't have the time to sweat these racial daggers. She has her hands full being a full-time university wife, administrator and mother to several children, one of whom teeters close to full-blown mental illness. "She can't stop being a mother in order to chase down this mystery," Carter explains. "She has to continue to do all these things."

It is hard in such moments not to feel even the tiniest bit of what critics have labelled, rather broadly and lazily, as Carter's neo-conservatism. "Family" and "values" are not terms he uses ironically, nor is the phrase "As a Christian" something he would put in sarcastic quotes. Indeed, he first entered the public eye in a big way 13 years ago when his The Culture of Disbelief, about how American law and politics trivialised religion, became President Clinton's favourite book. When not teaching at Yale, he has taught values-based leadership classes at the Aspen Institute. He has also run a Boy Scout troop.

While it would be unfair to say New England White is nostalgic for how things used to be, it engages with that feeling among women of Julia's station who were brought up in the shadow of Harlem's great African-American salons. "Julia was raised a certain way, was raised with a certain understanding of what's important, and all her life has been kicking against the strictures that have been placed on her," says Carter. She feels the etiquette of this world strongest when dealing with her mentally unstable daughter. "There is a feeling in the African-American community about mental illness, of 'why can't you get yourself together?'" Carter says. "I'm not sure why it exists, but I can say that it does."

Growing up in Washington and Harlem, dreaming of being a writer, Carter says he was just as influenced by Dickens as by African-American writers. But he is careful not to pigeonhole himself. As admiring as he is of writers of the inter-war Harlem Renaissance, he differs on a fundamental level. "Take someone like Langston Hughes," Carter says. Hughes was trying in his work to "interpret for a larger audience not merely Harlem, but an idea, an ideology, a way of thinking - not simply here are some things that some black people do, but here is the way that black people think."

Carter's project as a public intellectual, and now a storyteller, has been radically different. Without being so naive as to disavow the persistence of discrimination, he has endeavoured to be his own man, and refused to "think black". He merely wants to think, and now to tell a good story. As for the ongoing struggle of integration, Carter says that's for America to decide: "All I can say is this: there are a lot of reasons for the tension, doubtless there are faults on both sides... I am not trying to solve it. I'm just trying to show that it exists." Carter pauses to consider an appropriate ending, finding it quickly. "And perhaps by being aware that it exists, people will be more likely to ameliorate it."

Interesting? Click here to explore further