The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Stephen L Carter

Beyond the fanfares about this pricey début, Graham Caveney finds an ingenious legal thriller in an intriguing black-bourgeois setting - but not much more than that

When a début novel arrives boasting not only of its $4m advance, but also that it is the most talked-about book in decades, publishers can hardly be surprised if it, well, changes the way it gets talked about. Does the reviewer dig out a thesaurus in search of the superlatives, or claim their 13 seconds of fame by being the first to start the backlash? In launching a media coup, one of the first casualties of a campaign can be the novel itself. Let me try to cut to the chase.

In The Emperor of Ocean Park, Stephen L Carter has produced a highly readable, middle-class American legal thriller whose structure incorporates elements of the campus novel, domestic drama and meditations on the conflicted identity of the black bourgeoisie. Talcott Garland is a professor of law at an Ivy League university. His wife is in the running to be the first black woman on the Supreme Court, although her chances are jeopardised by the fact that her father-in-law was a judicial contender publicly disgraced by revelations of his associations with a known mobster called Jack Ziegler.

When the old judge dies, everyone from the Mob to the FBI are convinced that he left behind "a set of arrangements" that will dig up every political skeleton ever to be buried on the eastern seaboard. All are convinced that Talcott knows either the secrets' whereabouts or their contents (he doesn't), and so he is forced to go looking for that which his father's enemies are convinced he already has.

As a conceit, this works with ingenuity and tension – the narrator watching his watchers in the hope that they will find out what they think he has found out. Like a legal purloined letter, Carter exploits all the high-octane paranoia of this panopticon of unknown knowledge.

Yet, containing the "multi-layered complexity" of the blurb's bravado, the narrative then takes on two metaphoric leaps. The first is that the key to the closet can be found in the judge's chess obsession. Not only did he set himself Russian Grandmaster problems, but two pieces go missing from his set during the wake at his house. In case any symbolism is lost, Talcott finds it necessary to remind us that chess is – wait for it – a game played between black and white.

It is among these leaps that the plot falls down. The hunt for the pawns descends into the kind of implausible connections that make even Conan Doyle seem desperate (the risible denouement is "elementary" in the worst possible way).

Meanwhile, the chess/race simile is stretched to breaking point: "He kept talking about how even chess was fixed, white moved first, white usually won, black could only react to what white did, and even if black played a perfect game he still had to wait for white to make a mistake before he had any hope of winning."

This may have proved a useful paradigm, and there are certainly some engaging asides about affirmative action and black aspiration. But Carter labours the point so much that it becomes as imprisoning as it is illuminating. Similarly, his reflections on the "problem" of African-American conservatism rarely reach beyond the platitudinous: "Like most rebels, we often fail to see how much we have come to resemble the very thing we pretend to loathe." You don't say ... except that he does say, time and time again, and the novel all too often sinks under the weight of its own polemic.

Not that I disliked this book. There are some terrific set pieces on academia and its discontents, and Carter's vignettes of familial rivalry are first rate. But I was not as impressed with the book as it is with itself. Having invested so much in this author, it is a pity that his publishers seem too frightened to edit him. Then again, anyone worth $4m should not need editing ... should they?

Graham Caveney's 'Screaming with Joy: the life of Allen Ginsberg' is published by Bloomsbury