What it lacks in dramatic happening it makes up for in thick description. At times this latter quality bogs the story down, but once can get invested in the rhythm. In some ways Sag Harbor is an anti-coming-of-age novel. There is no great epiphany. Our hero doesn't triumph and get all the treasure, instead he moves onto the next beat knowing a little more than he did last year, but can't be quite sure he's better for it. Some might want a cleaner catharsis from their narratives, but there's no shortage of clean burning novels of a transition. I was curious about this book because my grandparents lived in Sag Harbor for over 50 years and I don't recall ever seeing any black people there, certainly not entire enclaves of upper-class black families as Whitehead describes in his semi-autobiographical novel. I had heard that there was a poor part of town where the maids and gardeners of rich people lived, but I never saw it myself, and my grandparents weren't quite that wealthy. I asked my mom about it and she said they were black enclaves but "they didn't exactly stroll down Main Street." Whitehead describes the black families keeping more or less to their own beaches, aside from the kids' summer jobs and occasional forays to the ocean. I was also interested because, coincidentally, my brother's name is Ben, just like the protagonist, and my grandfather was a podiatrist, just like the protaganist's father. I very much enjoyed this glimpse of Sag Harbor in the 80s, just as it was starting to transform from a sleepy former whaling town to a destination for the ultra-wealthy. It was never as fashionable as the Hamptons, and being nestled on the island of North Haven, between the forks, it doesn't have any ocean frontage. This could be why black families were able to purchase the land, I guess it must have been in the 50s or 60s. Of course nowadays celebrities like Martha Stewart and Puff Daddy live in Sag Harbor. I guess the rich folk ran out of land to buy on the forks. Whitehead reveals a fascinating world that is totally unknown to me: upper-class black families with beach houses. Although he describes his fictional family as middle-class, I would put them more in the upper-class category, with two Ivy-educated parents, a doctor and a lawyer, kids in private school, seven-room pre-war apartment in the city, and the Sag Harbor beach house. By my standards, that's affluence. The novel revolves around teenage Benji, who summers in Sag Harbor with his brother Reggie, largely unsupervised except for weekend visits from his parents, who don't make it out every weekend. The book covers the standard teenage experience: jobs, girlfriends, cars, music, fashion, and so forth. Interestingly, it is only in Sag Harbor that Benji has a group of black friends. In the city, in his upscale private school, most of his fellow students are white. I wish Whitehead had written more about the city life and how Benji differs in the two environments. Did he tone down his speech among his white friends to exclude the "signifying" and other aspects of Black English? Did he feel more like his true self in Sag Harbor, or the other way around? Whitehead describes some interesting aspects of being a "black boy with a beach house," which was unfathomable in the 80s. Being white myself, I really enjoyed these parts of the novel as many things had never occurred to me due to my own perspective. For example, I can eat a watermelon and it doesn't signify anything in particular. Whitehead describes how no black person would ever carry a watermelon down Main Street. It'd be like a walking stereotype. That's the sort of thing that a white person just doesn't really ever consider. The novel brushes with more serious topics, such as Benji's father being sort of an abusive jerk, hitting Benjy for not standing up to a student who made a racist remark, being extremely mean to his mother because she bought the wrong kind of paper plates. Of course, anyone who remembers the 80s remembers that women were not only expected to work outside the home but also to do all the cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Liberation ended up saddling women with twice as much work in the name of equality. The idea of a dad doing any sort of parenting was so hilariously unreal that a comedy flick was made about it - Mr. Mom. A dad changing diapers - hilarious! Of course it's now commonplace and unremarkable, but not so in the 80s. The problem with the book is that it only brushes over what might be serious conflict, such as Benjie's abusive father, his kissing his pal's girlfriend, his friend's mother's accidental use of the "n-word" - tossed around casually by the teens in the book, but a harsh slur to me, reading the book through my own perspective. Quite a few plot points are left unexplored - the BB lodged above his eye in an ill-fated BB-gun fight, him intentionally leaving the freezer door open at his ice cream parlor job, his friends whose parents divorce, forcing the moms to live in Sag Harbor full-time, the families of bigamists, the mysterious troublemaking teen who shows up at the very end, presumed to be someone's cousin, but is related to no one. Even little things, like why his father, described as a master griller, burns the chicken, are left unexplained. I just think there could have been a little more depth. It reads like a very entertaining YA novel about "how I spent my summer vacation." Not necessarily a bad thing, but given that the subject matter of affluent black families in the 80s is one that is quite unknown to many white readers, I think there is a missed opportunity here to give the topic a little more weight.
What do You think about Sag Harbor (2009)?
Lots of great parts, just really slow moving. The sections about 80s music were hilarious.
—armywife70634
Black youth coming of age. Not a strong plot. Read for Book Club.
—Pete
Sloooooooooow with entirely too much (unnecessary) text.
—chuerta
