Academics, writers, revolutionaries, students, housewives, spies, presidents…they’re all here in this marvelous novel. Each lovingly and carefully drawn. Perhaps none of them so well drawn as the real figure of Richard Nixon who comes completely alive on the pages of Palace Council. In one memorable scene, Nixon is meeting with Eddie right after the Watergate Scandal has broken. Nixon weeps and then he and Eddie have a long and convoluted series of conversations in which he asks Eddie of he prays. Eddie demurs and Nixon says “You should, Eddie. Do you know I prayed?... I prayed that I wouldn’t have to wake up this morning…. Can’t do business this way.”
As he has done in his other two novels, Carter paints a portrait of the black privileged class that is unparalleled in modern literature: giving those of us who have not previously been privy the inside dope. And inside dope it is: the details rich and stunning, the characters absolutely memorable. Some of the families from the previous novels show up here, which made me want nothing so much as to go back and re-read those novels. In addition, Harlem has never seemed so alive and its demise never seemed so tragic.
In straightforward, Hemingway-esque, clear and beautiful prose (“His host knew people, and the kind of people he knew, knew other people.”), is Carter’s plot told: in the mid fifties, a cabal of super-important, well connected white men, and a few equally well connected black men, form the Palace Council, whose symbolism, Eddie learns well into the book, comes from Milton. This group wishes nothing so much as to rock the world and change things as we know them. But they are also tied into a bunch of shadowy government agencies, as well as those we know: the F.B.I. for one. Who, indeed, is pulling the strings? Even for those who completely eschew conspiracy theories, the idea that our government is doing things to us we will never know about should not be a stretch of the imagination.
In one scene, Aurelia talks to her brother-in-law, Oliver Garland, a prominent Washington, D.C. judge, about Nixon and what role he plays in what is going on.
Oliver tells her:
“I don’t think much of your friend Nixon, Aurie. I never have. He’s too goal-oriented for my taste. I’m old-fashioned. I believe that games have rules, and you don’t switch the rules around just because your side might lose if you play it straight. Nixon’s the other way. Well, a lot of people are these days.”Eddie, whose beloved sister, Junie, disappears into the underground of student revolution and resistance, and Aurelia, whose husband, Kevin, is “sacrificed” for the cause, both leave behind clues that Eddie and Aurelia follow independently and together for the entirety of the book. Yes, the plot is sometimes implausible, and yes, it takes years for things to shake out, and yes, we do wonder where the hell Junie is in all this and why she neglects to let her brother in on her secrets. But, for all that, the plot and what moves it: the search for answers to so many questions, is secondary to Carter’s desire to write a novel about what happened back then and why. A novel about what it means to be black in America, during a time when just being black and outspoken was dangerous indeed.
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