Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

The Barnes & Noble Review

Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor is a high-spirited delight of a novel, a sunny surprise from Whitehead, a MacArthur Fellow who is a master of the ironic postmodern narrative. His satiric first novel, The Intuitionist, a philosophical detective story starring a black female elevator inspector, drew raves for originality as well as comparisons to Ellison, Morrison, Orwell, and Pynchon. His John Henry Days, a Pulitzer finalist and a National Book Critics Circle fiction finalist, poked fun at press junkets while asking serious questions about the "steel-driving man" behind the myth.

Whitehead's avowedly autobiographical fourth novel is set in the fabled Hamptons. But it evokes the coming-of-age pleasures of summer anywhere -- ice cream, barbecues, messing around, trying to figure out what's cool. Whitehead dials us back to 1985 (the era of Run-D.M.C., Miami Vice, The Cosby Show, and Stouffer's frozen dinners). He frames his story within the seasonal brackets of Memorial Day and Labor Day. As the novel begins, Benji, 15, and his younger brother, Reggie (at 10 months apart, they are almost twins), sleep in the backseat as their father hits the Long Island Expressway before dawn for the first drive to the family's summer place in the village of Sag Harbor. When they arrive, Benji is joyous: "Same sun wrapped in shiny paper, same soft benevolent sky, same gravel road that sooner or later skinned you…. We were grateful to be standing there in that heat after such a long bleak year in the city." Then it is time to figure out who else is out at the beach, and for how long. And so the summer colony begins to form, based in part on the vagaries of fortune (Benji hopes never to join the ranks of "Those Who Didn't Come Out Anymore").

Whitehead structures Benji's summer adventure as a series of set pieces that draw specifics from the historically African-American communities in Sag Harbor. During the village's whaling days, its Eastville section was settled primarily by black and Indian workers. Later, this area of Sag Harbor became a sort of summer retreat for members of the Harlem Renaissance. Its status as a resort was solidified in the 1940s, when Maude Terry founded Azurest, the historically African-American community of professionals, by discovering a large parcel of waterfront land for sale and subdividing it among her friends and neighbors. As one of a circle of "black boys with beach houses," as Benji puts it, "we fit in there."

Benji has his own spin on things, including race relations. Walking to town ("White Sag Harbor"), he avoids the corner with the pickup truck sporting a Confederate-flag bumper sticker. On the ocean beach, where he and his friends are the only black people, he sees his buddy Clive's mix tape as "an invasion of metropolitan funk." Noting the lifeguard's "Shark Attack" whistle, Benji thinks it would be cool to have a Jaws moment and spot a shark fin gliding in the waves.

Benji and his brother hang out with kids they've spent every summer with since they were born. In this close-knit community, some of Benji's friends are second-, even third-generation Sag Harbor babies. "We were copying our parents, who went back just as far, beating each other up thirty years ago under the same sky. Eating each other's barbecue, chasing each other down the hacked-out footpaths to the beach before there were roads, beach houses, a community at all."

In a chapter titled "If I Could Pay You Less, I Would," Whitehead goes over the top with an extended riff on Benji's first summer job at Jonni Waffle, an ice cream shop on the wharf with a "waffle-cone aroma" and absurd flavors like Cran-Mocha Praline. Benji succumbs to the "all the free ice cream he could eat" part of the deal and ends up nauseous at the end of each day. By chapter's end, with Benji's vision of the ultimate ice cream meltdown ("a cookie-clotted sludge oozing across the floor, marshmallows floating like broken teeth"), Whitehead has us feeling Benji's aversion to sweets.

Next door is the disco. Whitehead mines the great pop culture moments of the 1980s in his descriptions of Bayside, which is modeled after a real-life Sag Harbor club where kids from up and down the East Coast, black and white, flocked to hear Lisa Lisa, Cult Jam, U.T.F.O , Steel Pulse, and UB40 perform, while their folks lined up to see Tina Turner and Tito Puente. Naturally, the celebrity spillover ends up at Jonni Waffle, where Benji and his underage buddies scheme to wrangle their way into the disco with ice cream. And one night, at last , Benji sails through the open doors -- exuding their gusts of "Super Freak" -- into the dark realm of "waitresses in nipple-popping T-shirts, battle-worn from a summer of rough duty," and hears a U.T.F.O. concert. Looking back, Benji concludes that "Roxanne, Roxanne" is corny: "It's a classic because of when it came out, those early days of hip-hop when anything with a bit of novelty was mesmerizing, but it's goofy as hell."

Some of Whitehead's sharpest comic moments revolve around Benji and Reggie's sibling strategies, honed over the years according to the "rough frontier justice of even Stephen." They have such rules as "Thou Shalt Not Clean Thy Brother's Soup Pot." On Mondays, after their folks drive back to town, Benji and Reggie luxuriate in the freedom of having weekdays on their own. Throughout the week, they allow the dishes to pile up into a "jutting, ziggurat mess," occasionally dealing with such smelly messes as maggots in the remnants of Sunday's taco pan. Thursdays are reserved for misadventures -- "thoroughly botched mishaps that called for shame and first aid and apologies." That's because on Friday, the parents return. Among their Thursday escapades is a BB gun war that leads to minor mayhem. Within a few sentences, Whitehead ranges from the lyrical ("A firefly blinked into existence, drew half a word in the air. Then gone") to the visceral ("…something hit me in the face with a rock. Hot oil! Hot oil!").

Benji fantasizes about the trajectory of his father's voice when riled ("I imagined the progress of the sound waves through the air, as depicted in my Introduction to Physics textbook"), and confesses to his secret shame, listening to Sag Harbor's Classic Oldies station, WLNG (the "WLNG Effect," he explains, is "a feeling of nostalgia for something that never existed. It creeped people out"). His perceptions are sunnily optimistic, painted with summer's brightness and freedom. As Labor Day approaches, a frenetic quality enters the scene. To the beat of "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now" -- the "Black National Anthem" of the day -- the Labor Day parties begin, signaling the end to the carefree months.

By summer's end, Benji feels smarter, more together, closer to a more grown-up "Ben." He has worked at his first job and said good-bye to braces, hello to romance. He invents a new look (starting with combat boots), thinks about new music, imagines what he'll be able to do when he turns 16, with a major focus on girls. Gracefully, with restraint and wit, Whitehead gives us inklings of an independent, thoughtful, self-deprecating man-to-be about to emerge after this crucial summer.

Sag Harbor is an infectiously entertaining novel. Will Whitehead continue in this new, lighter comic vein? I suspect not. With its glowing and affectionate portrait of a more innocent time, Sag Harbor has the feel of lightning in a bottle. --Jane Ciabattari

Jane Ciabattari is president of the National Book Critics Circle.

From the Publisher

The warm, funny, and supremely original new novel from one of the most acclaimed writers in America

The year is 1985. Benji Cooper is one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends his falls and winters going to roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing too much Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to catch glimpses of nudity on late-night cable TV. After a tragic mishap on his first day of high school—when Benji reveals his deep enthusiasm for the horror movie magazine Fangoria—his social doom is sealed for the next four years.
But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals have built a world of their own. Because their parents come out only on weekends, he and his friends are left to their own devices for three glorious months. And although he’s just as confused about this all-black refuge as he is about the white world he negotiates the rest of the year, he thinks that maybe this summer things will be different. If all goes according to plan, that is.
There will be trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to fumble through, and state-of-the-art profanity to master. He will be tested by contests big and small, by his misshapen haircut (which seems to have a will of its own), by the New Coke Tragedy of ’85, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, with a little luck, things will turn out differently this summer.
In this deeply affectionate and fiercely funny coming-of-age novel, Whitehead—using the perpetual mortification of teenage existence and the desperate quest for reinvention—lithelyprobes the elusive nature of identity, both personal and communal.

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

Detailing the life of a dorky teenager in a community that's peculiar but oddly familiar, Sag Harbor is a kind of black "Brighton Beach Memoirs," but it's spiced with the anxieties of being African American in a culture determined to dictate what that means…The novel's eight chapters are, in effect, masterful short stories, deceptively desultory as they riff on the essential quests of teenage boys: BB guns, nude beaches, beer and, above all, the elusive secret to fitting in. But plot is the least of Whitehead's concerns here. Charm alone drives most of these chapters, the seductive voice of a narrator as clever as he is self-deprecating, moving from one comic anecdote to the next with infectious delight in his own memories.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

[Whitehead] captures the fireflies of teenage summertime in a jar without pretending to have some larger purpose…What's best about Sag Harbor is the utter and sometimes mortifying accuracy of its descriptive details…And given the minefield of social and cultural choices that Benji and his friends must navigate, Sag Harbor has unusually good reason to dwell on minutiae.

The New York Times Book Review - Toure

Whitehead's delicious language and sarcastic, clever voice fit this teenager who's slowly constructing himself. Sag Harbor is not "How I became a writer"; there's no hint of Benji's destiny beyond his sharp-eyed way of looking at things, his writerly voice and his desire to provide a historical and sociological context for blacks in the Hamptons. Still, with the story meandering like a teenager's attention, the book feels more like a memoir than a traditional plot-driven novel. It's easy to come away thinking not much happens—Whitehead has said as much—but Sag Harbor mirrors life, which is also plotless. It's an inner monologue, a collection of stories about a classic teenage summer where there's some cool stuff and some tedium and Benji grows in minute ways he can't yet see.

Publishers Weekly

In what Whitehead describes as his "Autobiographical Fourth Novel" (as opposed to the more usual autobiographical first novel), the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist John Henry Days explores the in-between space of adolescence through one boy's summer in a predominantly black Long Island neighborhood. Benji and Reggie, brothers so closely knit that many mistake them for twins, have been coming out to Sag Harbor for as long as they can remember. For Benji, each three-month stay at Sag is a chance to catch up with friends he doesn't see the rest of the year, and to escape the social awkwardness that comes with a bad afro, reading Fangoria, and being the rare African-American student at an exclusive Manhattan prep school. As he and Reggie develop separate identities and confront new factors like girls, part-time jobs and car-ownership, Benji struggles to adapt to circumstances that could see him joining the ranks of "Those Who Don't Come Out Anymore." Benji's funny and touching story progresses leisurely toward Labor Day, but his reflections on what's gone before provide a roadmap to what comes later, resolving social conflicts that, at least this year, have yet to explode. (Apr.)

Bette-Lee Fox - Library Journal

Fifteen-year-old Benji has spent every summer since he can remember in Sag Harbor, NY. The rest of the year, he's a black preppie from Manhattan, with a doctor father and a lawyer mother and a younger brother, Reggie. It is 1985, and Reggie gets a job at Burger King, leaving Benji (who would prefer to be called Ben) to hang with his summer friends (the term posse wasn't invented yet), other black prep school refugees. Not a lot happens during those three months. Or does everything happen, all that matters to an insecure, nerdy teen just beginning to recognize the man he might become? Scooping ice cream at Jonni Waffle, riding to the "white beach" with the one guy who's got a car, trying to crash a Lisa Lisa concert at the hip club, and kissing a girl and copping a feel are significant events in a life that encompasses generations of folks who called Sag Harbor home. Wonderful, evocative writing, as always, from Whitehead (Apex Hides the Hurt); male readers especially will relate. Highly recommended. [Prepub Alert, LJ12/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice. Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work-in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)-he'll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family's summer retreat of New York's Sag Harbor. "According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses," writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There's an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist's eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary. Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead's earlier work,but a whole lot of fun to read.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Reading Group Guide
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Table of Contents

Reading Group Guide

1. How does each of Benji’s comrades (Reggie, NP, Randy, Bobby, Marcus, Clive) contribute to the group? What challenges do they face as friends?

2. Explain the differences between Benji’s age group and that of his sister. During these years, why is the disparity between high school and college so acute?

3. Benji comments that “the rock” on the beach near his beach house serves as a racial barrier. White people won’t walk much further past it. What similar examples can you think of that exist today or in your own community? How have racial barriers changed in the last 20 years? How are they still the same?

4. The emergence of hip-hop is a strong influence in the lives of Benji and his friends. In what ways does music affect their generation? In what ways has music affected your own life?

5. Benji grapples with his identity throughout the novel. At one point he states:

“According to the world we were the definition of a paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it.” (Pg. 57)

How is this community a paradox? How is Benji’s identity shaped by the two worlds he inhabits, both during the school year, and then during the summer season?

6. Benji often refers to the handshake, song, and/or dance he will surely conquer by the “end” of the summer. To what degree is he constantly trying to reinvent himself?

7. What do you think are the characteristics of a typical 1980’s adolescent? How does Benji fit the stereotype? How is he different?

8. Benji clearly realizes toward the endof the summer that what he loves, is perhaps not the girls he pines after, but his beach home and “what he put into it.” He reflects back on a tender moment with his family and the fond memories of being a child. What is it about our childhoods that evoke such special memories within us? Is there a place from your own past that touched your life as Sag Harbor touched Benji?

9. Throughout the novel there looms a hint of darkness behind the relationship between Benji’s father and his family. His father seems to have a violent strain. How does this affect Benji and his family? What is the role of the father in a young man’s coming of age?

10. From Catcher in the Rye to Stand By Me, the coming-of-age novel is a perennial in American literature. What do you think is so appealing and universal about this genre?

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