Before I delve into my thoughts on Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, I need to make an announcement. I will be appear on Nicole Bonía’s That’s How I Blog talk show/podcast on Tuesday, April 27th (at 6 p.m. PT). Basically, Nicole is interviewing her way through the book blogging world, getting people to opinionate. And I am good for an opinion or two! I guarantee I won’t be bland. Stupid, uninformed, and ill-considered are all possibilities, however.
For that appearance, I selected Mr. Whitehead’s Sag Harbor for the 20 Minute Book Club segment that follows the main interview. As you’ll see in the text below, it’s an excellent book, and I think it will be a fun discussion. If you haven’t read it, you have about two weeks.
What is there to read in Sag Harbor? It’s a nostalgic look at a mid-1980s summer in the Hamptons by a 40 year old man. It’s largely a character based novel. The summer is event-filled, but the plot does not build toward any climax. At the end of the summer, the main character, Benji, will go home. That’s it. In the hands of a lesser writer, I would be shredding such a book as pointless. But Colson Whitehead kept me riveted.
Style-wise, the book contains some masterful metaphors. Man can metaphor get tiring sometimes, but these were great. His are descriptive, but not forced or obtrusive. Benji and Reggie hang out with Marcus until they are kicked out the sticky green door to the next afternoon oasis
. Shortcuts are a slim corridor into the woods
. The sun is a sick death ray cutting through the sky
. Okay, that last one is a little more obtrusive, but it’s still great! Everything beside the dialogue inspired images and sound. It’s rare for description to thrill me so much.
After this, there may be spoilers.
Benji narrates the story and is the older of two brothers. Reggie trails him in age by 10 months. Like twins, the often go together. At the beginning of the book, Benji tells us that the two brothers are starting to become individuals rather than a pair. Their closeness comes across in Mr. Whitehead’s characterization, as does Reggie’s increasing identity separate from Benji. Benji is far more comfortable together and far less comfortable when he has to socialize.
Other characters are just as complete as the two brothers, sometimes more so. In fact, Reggie was the one character I felt like I didn’t really know. N.P. gets his nickname from his tall tales and the group’s typical response (read the book for the reason). Randy is the older kid with a car, hanging out with the younger ones so he can be the big man. There’s others. I liked all of them.
Benji’s father is a podiatrist. His mother is a government lawyer. During the school year, the family lives in Manhattan, where Benji and Reggie attend a prep school. They summer in Sag Harbor, a black enclave in the Hamptons on Long Island. The summer that is the subject of the book, the two get to stay in the summer home by themselves, with their parents present for the weekends.
The narration is by a 40 year old Benji. This results in a nostalgic and somewhat melancholic quality to the text. I suspect that everything narrator Benji tells us isn’t quite the truth. I don’t expect he’s intentionally deceptive. It’s that we all look back at our childhood’s through a prism of memory and baggage, sometimes seeking out the experiences which formed our current world view. Benji rather ominously foreshadows future tragedy for the summer playmates, which leads me to believe he’s looking at this time in his life for clues.
The interactions slowly reveal more and more behind the façade of the perfect middle-class black family. Rest assured, when the curtain is swept aside, they aren’t monsters (a bit spoilery there, I know). But Benji’s father is an alcoholic and domineering. Still, Benji loves him and only slowly comes to realize his father’s faults, despite living with them his entire life. What I really like about the writing is that Benji doesn’t consciously acknowledge these shortcomings even to himself during the time period described. It’s very much the adult narrator who has complete knowledge. Mr. Whitehead deftly let’s the reader in on the secret so that we learn it not at the beginning, but gradually and before the teenage Benji does.
Benji also has a tenuous relationship with black history. He’s one generation removed from the civil rights movement and views it as something his parents did. Young Benji that is. He’s subjected to racism, some of it pretty overt, but little of the outright discrimination previous generations experienced. (Which makes me want to go find some non-fiction that covers the transition in black civil rights concerns from de jure discrimination to less overt prejudice underlying our society.) What he experiences doesn’t produce instant outrage, and allows him to ignore civil rights figures like Marcus Garvey, or the details of Malcolm X’s life. I get the feeling the older narrator Benji regrets his younger incarnation’s naivete.
One big part of my reading of Sag Harbor is that I kept thinking about how similar my life was to Benji’s. Obviously, my white suburban self did not experience racism nor did my parents feel the weight of being a first generation of the middle class of their race. But, my grandparents did buy a vacation property (in the Cascades) where I got to spend time during summers, though not as extensively as Benji and Reggie do. I got to spend a few weekends every summer. There I ran with a gang of kids that resembled Benji’s summer gang. Our gangs never persisted from year to year like in Sag Harbor. Also: similar prep school, and similar issues with my parents.
However, there are obviously some differences. Big differences. I’m white and I grew up in a pretty white neighborhood. My prep school, like Benji’s, had only a few black kids in it. I was on the other side of the racial coin. For all I remember, I might have been perpetrating some of the same prejudices against black students that Benji talks about. My memory of high school is very fuzzy. White kids like me, particularly prep school attendees, generally have the privilege of not having to think about race outside of the school curriculum. I didn’t. Things like that wouldn’t have imprinted on my memory.
I liked Sag Harbor because, in addition to liking the characters and wanting to see how they handled situations, it got me thinking about a blank spot in my racial awareness: middle class black communities. It’s not that I didn’t know they existed, or that I was surprised by anything about the Sag Harbor community in the story, but that I just didn’t think much about them. Mind you, I have no clue how representative or authentic the story is. I’m not using Whitehead’s story to fill a knowledge gap. Or at least I hope I’m not. Even if it’s not authentic, the situation is certainly plausible, and should get people unaccustomed to looking for subtle racism to think about it.
From the acknowledgments at the end, I gather that Colson Whitehead spent some time in Sag Harbor as an adolescent, possibly making this partially autobiographical. Not the first autobiographical book I’ve ever read, of course. Some parts might be from Mr. Whitehead’s own experience, some might be made of whole cloth (they didn’t happen the way it’s told in the book, but it makes for a better story), and some might be amalgamations of the experience of others either with him or relayed after the fact. I wonder how a writer’s headspace differs for each category. I.e., when it’s personal experience, you can relive it to create the scene. When making something completely up, you can’t pull details from memory; they have to be invented. Where does using someone else’s experience fall? Is this even a relevant question? I dunno. I’m a reader and normally I don’t care too much to see how the sausage is made, but for some reason I’m pondering this.
Really good book. Hopefully I am able to discuss it well for That’s How I Blog.
Title: Sag Harbor
Author: Colson Whitehead
Cover creator: Rodrigo Corral (designer) / Tracy Morford (photographer)
Imprint / publisher: Doubleday / Random House
Format: Hardcover
Length: 273 p.
Publication date: 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-385-52765-1
