The Darker Nation Inside New England

Lemaster and Julia Carlyle, the married couple at the heart of Stephen Carter's new novel, "New England White" (Knopf, 576 pages, $26.95), made a brief appearance in his debut, "The Emperor of Ocean Park" (2002). We were introduced there to Lemaster by the narrator, Talcott Garland, who, like Lemaster, is a black a professor at a law school loosely based on Yale in the fictional town of Elm Harbor. By Talcott's own estimation, Lemaster enjoyed a position several notches above his in the school's "unwritten hierarchy."

When we encounter Lemaster again in "New England White," this preeminence has cemented spectacularly — he is now president of the university and lives with his family in Tyler's Landing, one of Elm Harbor's "toniest suburbs." But for all their status and accomplishment (Julia is on the university faculty too, a dean in the divinity school), life in Tyler's Landing feels to the Carlyles like exile. They might be the "most celebrated couple in black America's lonely Harbor County outpost," but they are largely ignored by their neighbors. This, it seems to Julia, is the "segregated truth at the heart of integration."

There is an echo here of something that occurs to Talcott in the earlier book, a sense that there is a white social scene going on around him that he is able to discern only fleetingly. For Julia, the condescension of her colleagues and the indifference of her white students makes her feel nearly as invisible on campus as she does in the Landing. Indeed, invisibility becomes a kind of organizing motif in the novel, one that Mr. Carter handles with such delicacy that its patterning and texture are as substantial and thrilling as the satisfactions of plot we know him capable of delivering.

Like "The Emperor of Ocean Park," this novel begins with a body — in this instance, that of Kellen Zant, a black economist at the university with whom Julia had had a love affair 20 years earlier. Julia and Lemaster discover Zant's corpse when their car veers off the icy road on the way home from a faculty party. With suspicious haste, the police blame Zant's death on a botched robbery. Lemaster orders Bruce Vallely, the black head of campus security, to investigate — which he does sometimes in concert, sometimes in fraught competition, with Julia, who is conducting her own freelance inquiry into the death of her former lover.

Shortly before he was murdered, Zant was upbraided by Lemaster for giving time to private consultancy that would have been better spent on scholarship. It soon emerges, however, that in his last months Zant had been researching a 30-year-old murder case involving the daughter of an Elm Harbor professor, Gina Joule, for whose death a young black man had been blamed.

Bruce and Julia soon discover that they are not the only ones trying to extract what Zant, enbon économiste, called his "surplus," the information about what really happened to Gina. Mr. Carter takes as much writerly pleasure in pursuing this economic metaphor as he does in unraveling his plot, which leads back to what Lemaster calls the "hidden reality" between the "darker nation" and the "pale." Lemaster, it turns out, is a prime mover in the Empyreals, a black fraternity that operates in the shadows of political power and may have covered up the truth about Gina's murder, in return for the eternal indebtedness of those whose reputations it saved.

Mr. Carter's achievement here is to have found a way of placing a highly plausible murder mystery in the service of his wider concerns with the black experience and the vicissitudes of integration. Moreover, his treatment of these issues is genuinely novelistic rather than didactic: MrCarter has a rare ability comprehensively to evoke an alternative world — in this case, that of the black upper-middle class, to whose agonies of acceptance and exclusion he has an insider's sensitivity.

Crucial to his design is that Julia, rather than Lemaster, be the presiding narrative consciousness of the novel. The ambivalence of her social and racial position is central to her life, whereas for Lemaster it is merely an obstacle to overcome, in pursuit not only of his brilliant career but also of revenge for the crimes perpetrated against the "darker nation."

The author rewards Julia with a skeptic's insight into her husband's righteous fervor. Lemaster's favorite philosopher is Isaiah Berlin, who taught us better than anybody of the dangers of the utopian impulse in politics. But, as Julia realizes, Lemaster's absolutism, the dark matter at the heart of this mystery, consists of "pure and perfect righteousness." And as Berlin pointed out, "no cause has ever claimed more victims."

Mr. Derbyshire is a writer and critic based in London. He is the editor of "Time Out: 1000 Books to Change Your Life."