Colson's books are all quite different from one another in milieu, strategy, and their ultimate effect on the reader, though united by the signal laconic meter in his voice, by their keen sense of form and proportion, by their brilliance. In Sag Harbor he's "gone personal," though I wouldn't want to have to place bets on what is and isn't his own life-material here, or someone else's, or completely confabulated. This is one of my favorite kinds of books, where memory's kinesthetic floodgates open up to illuminate a lost world. It's like a meticulous diorama of the recent past, with the sharp edges of an exhibit in a museum, one where we learn just how strange and specific the universal experience of "coming of age" really can be. The mundane stuff of a Long Island summer here has the power both of a time capsule, and of an allegorical journey into what every human heart endures just trying to vault out of one's family and into the world of art, sex, and kinship that's so near, and so far off. All this, plus the greatest barbequed chicken wing in the history of literature past, present, or future. That's a pufferoon I'd guarantee with my life.
Your body is engulfed by chemicals of rage and despair, you pound, you shriek, you batter your head against the trees. You come away wounded, feeling that life is unknowable, can never be understood, only endured and sometimes cheated." Garrison Keilor Like Benji, the protagonist of Colson Whitehead's "Sag Harbor", I grew up in New York City. The city was my playground. My friends and I wandered the streets, went from playground to playground to play basketball, stickball, or roller hockey. We'd take the subway to Coney Island and spend days on the beach, on the boardwalk and on the amusement park rides. When we were feeling particularly frisky we'd head over to Riis Park at Far Rockaway and try to get a gander at the nude sunbathers. We'd rarely see our parents between sunrise and sunset. I felt in my element. This was my world. Then, when I hit 13 I was sent away to a boarding school. Right when I hit adolescence I was lifted up out of one world and placed by my parents in a new, ostensibly better world. The people I met were alien to me and the disaffection I felt at not quite fitting in was palpable. I spent 9 months longing to return to my universe but when I did I found that being in my old, more comfortable world, did not relive me of the unfettered angst of being a teenager or make me comfortable in a new world where girls, music, Colt 45 Malt liquor and the improbable dream of `becoming a man' still made each day one filled with a mixture of unease and anticipation. In a very real way this is the same world Benji inhabits. Benji spends 9 months of the year at a Manhattan prep school, a world unlike the middle class world he grew up in. Benji's disaffection may have played out along racial lines while mine was a divide of socio-economic class but the feelings Whitehead evinces in Benji seem to share a lot of the same DNA as my own. "Sag Harbor" is set in that 3-month summer gap after his return from prep school. Set in 1985 Sag Harbor is a local resort community created by and for middle class African-American families. Benji, 15, and his younger brother Reggie have the house to themselves during the week while their parents stay in the city to work. Their buddies lead similar partially adult-free lives. It is a gentle commingling of Lord of the Flies and Summer of 42. Sag Harbor is well-written and enjoyable. It evokes a time and place in the lives of teen boys. As some reviewers have noted there isn't what you would call a plot-driven narrative. There isn't a series of events leading to a dramatic climax. Like Seinfeld the book is about nothing but in the hands of Whitehead it is a charming read. The life I lived in my summer time was typically about nothing. What are we going to do today? What are we going to get up to? Can we find an older brother to get us some beer? Doesn't so-and-so look hot? Laughing at jokes we didn't quite understand and trying our best, but not successfully, to stay out of trouble, were the order of the day. The book may be about nothing but the writing makes it pleasurable. Benji's observations about himself and the world around him seem spot-on to me. As the summer progresses we see the best-laid plans sometimes work and sometimes fail. Whitehead is a fine writer and managed to keep me laughing, chuckling or sighing at Benji's `summer of `85'. Sag Harbor was a very enjoyable book to read. It brought back semi-sweet memories of days gone bye. If you are looking for a book with a roller coaster ride of highs and lows Sag Harbor is not for you. However, if you are looking for a very well-written piece that evokes memories of a time in your life when the fog of adolescence weighed heavily on each day's activities, then I think you will enjoy Sag Harbor.
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