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Stephen L. Carter is a Yale University law professor, author, and Christianity Today
columnist. Carter is a well established nonfiction writer, having written books like The Culture of Disbelief and Civility. He has now turned to fiction with a much publicized $4 million advance for two works of fiction, the first being The Emperor of Ocean Park (Knopf).

Why did you decide to start writing fiction?

I don't know if I could call it a decision as much as almost an obsession. I'd wanted to write fiction from the time I was pretty small. I used to go down to the corner store and buy little spiral notebooks when I was a little kid, in which I would write my science fiction and mystery stories and so on, usually fill in all the pages without any paragraph breaks or anything like that. And even as an adult I had for many years the yearning to write. I had these characters in mind and wanted to find the life space and vehicle to let them tell their stories. And finally it seemed to be time to do it.

How was it to write fiction?

Well, everybody seems to think that writing fiction is liberating. But I actually found it confining in a way. As a scholar, when I write nonfiction I have footnotes. I have sources. I have things I rely on. And that structure for me has always been very liberating. What cramped me in was recognizing that for everything I wrote, in the end, the authority was me. It was my imagination as opposed to some source I could point to. And that was an eerie feeling and sometimes a very scary one.

And so writing a novel, I put in these various asides, those little provocative thoughts to jog people about—issues about race or religion or class or a thousand other things. Even doing that I felt a little uneasy to have one of my characters make an argument and not have a footnote in the argument. To me it was uncomfortable.

But you pretty much include footnotes, anyway.

My author's note at the end of the book is absurdly long. And I spent a lot of time in there trying to say to the readers, yes, I know this staircase is not where I described it.

I had to do that for my own comfort. I don't think I could have written a novel, as a scholar, without making sure I got my facts right and making sure the reader knew. I was worried about people thinking that I knew less than I did. That doesn't mean there's no mistakes in the book, but those things that I intentionally changed I wanted the reader to know.

You dedicate the book to your mother and father but make it clear that the dad in this story is not yours.

You have to remember that the first five words of this book are, "When my father finally died." And because it's in the first person and it says father, people would say, "Oh, Carter must be describing his relationship with his father." I had to make it clear that that certainly wasn't the case.

What was your family like?

I'm the second of five children. I was born in Washington, D.C. We moved to Harlem when I was almost two years old. We lived there until second grade and then went back to Washington, D.C. I went to high school in Ithaca, New York. My father was by training a lawyer, although in the '60s, he worked in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. A little later he taught at Cornell and became an administrator. And my mother for most of the time, although she was a college graduate, stayed home and took care of the kids.

We were not a church going family, but my parents had been raised—actually both in the Episcopal church—and there were a couple of things that were always really very important to them. One of the values that was really important when I was growing up was honesty.

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September (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46