Author of the week: Stephen L. Carter

last updated 8 January 2015

Stephen L. Carter ran a small experiment with his latest novel, said Joseph Finder in TheDailybeast.com. The Yale law professor and best-selling author specializes in multilayered tales about black protagonists operating in the nation’s most rarefied circles. But for Jericho’s Fall, his slim new thriller, he worked hard to make sure that the book contained no physical description of its female protagonist. Rebecca DeForde, a 32-year-old who’s looking back on an affair she had at 19 with one of Washington’s most powerful men, does worry about her weight. Otherwise, she’s a blank screen. “I wondered whether, if I wrote a novel with a raceless character,” Carter wrote in his personal blog, readers would “default” to thinking she’s white.

Carter thinks it’s odd that many readers seem to have done exactly that, said Stephen M. Deusner in the Washington, D.C., Express. “Don’t get me wrong,” Carter says. “It’s not that she isn’t white. My point is that we just don’t know.” Starting an argument is actually the last thing he wants the new book to do. After all, Carter started writing fiction for fun several years ago, only to discover that writing complex, culturally ambitious thrillers “wears me out psychologically in a way that writing nonfiction does not.” Suddenly, he found himself wanting “to write something lighter as a break from that.” Jericho’s Fall, he says, “did not wear me out at all.”