Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

Are you looking for a good beach book that isn’t trashy? Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead is a coming of age story set in a real African American beach community on Long Island. Whitehead describes it as an imperfect Utopia for youths in search of their black identity.

Sag Harbor is based on Whitehead’s childhood and reads more like a memoir than a novel. There is no over-arching plot. The chapters are more like linked short stories or personal essays. Some worked better than others. The Gangsters was a page turner, but the one about scooping ice cream for minimum wage (and all you can eat) made me melt with vicarious boredom. Even so, Whitehead made me laugh, such as when he described the flavor Rum Raisin as “the polyester of ice cream.” The chapter was titled: “If I could pay you less, I would.”

Whitehead skewers racial stereotypes found in novels:

“They were every shade of the dessert menu of words beloved by romance novelists to describe African American skin, chocolate and caramel, butterscotch and mocha.”

Whitehead’s humor offsets the racial tension of his 1980s narrative. The central characters are teenaged boys whose parents were the first generation to go to college. These doctors and lawyers send their children to private school in New York City. Their kids work hard to fit in with their white, privileged classmates, but they also crave a black identity and street cred.

Only during the summer can these boys hang out together and be themselves or the selves they believe they should be. They play with B.B. guns and talk tough, imitating gang members. This would horrify their mothers, but the parents are working in the city on weekdays. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt….

Whitehead’s story really hit home to me. I’m two years older than the author. We both grew up in Manhattan and went to the same college. My friends and I danced at the NYC clubs mentioned in the novel. The landscape Whitehead describes is familiar even if we didn’t cross paths.

I started reading Sag Harbor on the ferry to Nantucket Island (featured in the photos) and finished it on a harborside beach. I love when my reading material matches my setting, but Nantucket is the opposite of Sag Harbor: near relentlessly white except for the seasonal domestic employees from the Caribbean and a handful of other families. I had to resort to fictional diversity.

Although the focus is on teenaged boys, Sag Harbor is literary fiction intended for an adult audience. Teenagers would relate to Whitehead’s well-drawn characters, but they might not get the 1980’s pop culture references and find the pace too slow. It would still be an interesting book to read along with your teenager to discuss race and peer pressure. Whitehead has an original and engaging voice. Listen:

“The sky over the wetlands was a fine, simmering blue, slowly boiling up morning. Before you lay the dead, misty surface of the bay, and imperturbable line of dark gray, a slab of ancient stone come out from under the earth. A reversal there: the sky was liquid, the water a solid screen. There were fewer boats then to zit the surface of the bay. No one to be seen at that hour, emboldening that cherished dread of early risers, that you were the only being alive and awake in the world. Occasionally some drowsily dipping seagull shot into the water....”

-Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

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@Barrie Summy

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