Sag Harbor

Sag Harbor, by Colson Whitehead, is an absolutely delightful novel that must be drawn on personal experience--the details are just too wonderful. Set in 1985, it covers one summer in the life of Benji, a fifteen-year-old African American boy as he and his brother enjoy their vacation in their summer home in the Long Island town of the title.

With an anthropologist's eye, Whitehead explores the interesting community of black professionals who have settled in the former whaling port. We learn that during the 1940s, blacks bought up properties in the town, just a few miles north of the Hamptons. They have left their properties to their children. Benji, son of a doctor and a lawyer (he notes the parallels to The Cosby Show), and his brother Reggie are left alone during the week, taking part-time jobs and hanging out with their friends, going to the movies, trying to get beer, and looking to get with girls.

This novel is exquisitely written, in a kind of florid style that made me slow down to savor each word. Whitehead writes the novel from Benji's adult point of view, and drops in a few melancholy bits of information--his parents fight constantly (Dad drinks a bit too much), but mostly the mood is light and nostalgic. There are tons of references to the time period, from the fiasco over New Coke to the music of the period. Benji is an encyclopedia of pop culture--there are references as arcane as Barbara Carerra in Never Say Never Again and a deconstruction of The Road Warrior.

We can all look back at our childhood years and feel a sense of loss, but this one seems like a great childhood. One chapter details what it was like to work at the local ice cream parlor, another examines an epic BB-gun shootout, all leading to Benji's first kiss. You can open the book at random and find passages of virtuosity: "My mouth. Is it possible I haven't mentioned my mouth yet? My mouth was everything you have ever found repellent gathered together, piled in a cauldron, melted down by sadists into an abhorrent alley, and then shaped into clips and wire for placement on my teeth. I wore braces, you see, tiny self-esteem-sucking death's-heads all in a row, turning my smile into a food-flecked grimace."

There are also great truths in the book. I was stopped short by this one: "Over time I have learned that what makes a man is not his ideas or his words, what makes a man is the ability to squeeze out a ferocious stream of lighter fluid from a can and throw a match on it." Truer words were never spoken.