Brenda's Book Bash

Sag Harbor, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 2009)

Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Sag Harbor, a coming-of-age narrative set in the upper middle class African American summer home community on Eastern Long Island in the 1980’s, marks an interesting departure from his previous high concept works. Whitehead’s books include three other novels—The Intuitionist, a darkly comic speculative fiction about race and class in a Gotham-like parallel universe; John Henry Days, an intricately structured narrative that explores the parallels between a contemporary African-American journalist and the real man behind the folk legend being celebrated at a ceremony conducted by the U.S. postal service; and Apex Hides the Hurt, a satire about a “nomenclature expert” whose crowning achievement is the development of a multicultural band-aid which is guaranteed to match the customer’s skin tone, “or your money back,” and who has been hired to mediate a community argument rife with racial discord over the renaming of a town.

Next to these ambitious and precociously inventive books, Sag Harbor might seem like light fare, more like a first novel than a fourth, but it does share a number of themes with these earlier works. The narrator, Benji, like many of Whitehead’s previous protagonists, is in the process of self-consciously constructing an identity. He sees himself as a “product” of his times, and the commodification of contemporary culture is also in evidence throughout the novel. Much of Whitehead’s writing centers on the degree to which upward mobility interferes with African-American authenticity, and many of the cultural contradictions Benji describes within his family, his group of friends, and the community at large will be familiar to his readers. The difference here, however, is the autobiographic feel of the novel, which has as much to do with the narrative voice as it does with the subject matter of the book.

Like many other similarly labeled “coming-of-age” novels, Benji’s story is told in the first person, which is another departure from Whitehead’s previous works. Benji’s voice, which moves back and forth through time but is obviously older and wiser than his teenage incarnation, emphasizes the significance of the summer of 1985, the first year that he and his brother Reggie are allowed to stay alone at the beach house during the week while his parents are back at their jobs in Manhattan. This is also the summer that the brothers begin to drift apart and have their own lives as Benji takes a job at Jonni Waffle, a popular ice cream parlor, and Reggie at the local Burger King. Benji, a self-described Dungeons and Dragons nerd who spends his school year trying not to stand out in his mostly white prep school, feels a sense of relief in the mostly black summer enclave, though even here he is often at odds with his peers. 

The dilemmas Benji faces appear to be the same ones that are acted out among the adult world of Sag Harbor. While the older generation have forged professional careers and achieved all the trappings of upward mobility, there is still a profound sense of relief in returning each summer to this self-segregated community. This is not to say, however, that they are escaping their underlying anxiety about the materialist trappings of their professional lives and the pressures of cultural conformity. In fact, there is a great deal of gossiping, posturing, and backstabbing among the adults as well as the teenagers Benji spends his summer hanging out with, and while many of the parents of his friends accuse their children of taking their material wealth for granted, they continue to fund and encourage the “keeping up with the Joneses” mentality they are trying to escape. 

The novel’s episodic structure is similar to what might be dubbed the workshop novel, which is not so much an extended narrative as a series of interlocking short stories with common characters. The utilitarian reason behind this unofficial sub-genre has to do with habits developed in MFA workshops, where writers are encouraged to submit self-enclosed short stories for easier classroom consumption but then are forced by the publishing establishment to produce the more easily marketed novels. This is not to say, however, that there are not aesthetic justifications for this looser narrative structure (the historical descendant of the contemplative, self-absorbed narratives of Mann or Proust, for example) that have nothing to do with either workshops or publishers. The individual chapters of Sag Harbor rely much less on the kind of sustained suspense or intricate interweaving of competing narratives of his earlier novels, but they are also not aimlessly slice-of-life of life. Benji’s summers are filled with a kind of trial and error approach to the negotiation of young adulthood, and the tensions are mostly between the lines—his feelings of a growing separation from his brother and sister, his inner dialogue on how to attract girls, his gnawing anxiety about his parents’ marriage, his isolation and abandonment issues. Each of the chapters is organized around some hurdle, like mastering the summer’s new slang, or getting into a concert at a club without being carded, making perfect waffle cones; or the recognition of his father’s failings as the family’s designated barbecue master and amateur barber. One of the more amusing chapters traces his utter dismay at the (termporary, as it turns out) discontinuation of Classic Coca-Cola, and his attempts to hoard the remaining supply. As it turns out, each of the pieces of this novel-in-stories captures another aspect of childhood certainty lost.

All of this is accomplished through Benji’s appealingly self-conscious and self-effacing voice, which is at times wickedly funny and at other times heart breaking and the masterful layering and organization of the summer’s events. As the pieces of his childhood identity fall away, he is left with the frightening but exciting possibilities of the next phase of life, which he is eager to jump in to. In the end this is one of the most unabashedly hopeful coming-of-age novels I have read, and a surprising and refreshing change of pace from one of our most interesting young novelists.