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Bound With These Titles
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Summary
Summary
The warm, funny, and supremely original new novel from one of the most acclaimed writers in America
The year is 1985. Benji Cooper is one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends his falls and winters going to roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing too much Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to catch glimpses of nudity on late-night cable TV. After a tragic mishap on his first day of high school--when Benji reveals his deep enthusiasm for the horror movie magazine Fangoria--his social doom is sealed for the next four years.
But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals have built a world of their own. Because their parents come out only on weekends, he and his friends are left to their own devices for three glorious months. And although he's just as confused about this all-black refuge as he is about the white world he negotiates the rest of the year, he thinks that maybe this summer things will be different. If all goes according to plan, that is.
There will be trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to fumble through, and state-of-the-art profanity to master. He will be tested by contests big and small, by his misshapen haircut (which seems to have a will of its own), by the New Coke Tragedy of '85, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, with a little luck, things will turn out differently this summer.
In this deeply affectionate and fiercely funny coming-of-age novel, Whitehead--using the perpetual mortification of teenage existence and the desperate quest for reinvention--lithely probes the elusive nature of identity, both personal and communal.
Author Notes
Colson Whitehead was born on November 6, 1969. He graduated from Harvard College and worked at the Village Voice writing reviews of television, books, and music.
His first novel, The Intuitionist, won the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award. His other books include The Colossus of New York, Sag Harbor, and Zone One. He won the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for John Henry Days, the PEN/Oakland Award for Apex Hides the Hurt, and the National Book Award for fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Underground Railroad.
His reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper's and Granta. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In what Whitehead describes as his "Autobiographical Fourth Novel" (as opposed to the more usual autobiographical first novel), the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist John Henry Days explores the in-between space of adolescence through one boy's summer in a predominantly black Long Island neighborhood. Benji and Reggie, brothers so closely knit that many mistake them for twins, have been coming out to Sag Harbor for as long as they can remember. For Benji, each three-month stay at Sag is a chance to catch up with friends he doesn't see the rest of the year, and to escape the social awkwardness that comes with a bad afro, reading Fangoria, and being the rare African-American student at an exclusive Manhattan prep school. As he and Reggie develop separate identities and confront new factors like girls, part-time jobs and car-ownership, Benji struggles to adapt to circumstances that could see him joining the ranks of "Those Who Don't Come Out Anymore." Benji's funny and touching story progresses leisurely toward Labor Day, but his reflections on what's gone before provide a roadmap to what comes later, resolving social conflicts that, at least this year, have yet to explode. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* MacArthur fellow Whitehead follows three inventive, satirical, and reverberating novels with a classic entering-manhood tale framed within the summer of 1985. Benji, 15, skinny, nerdy, well-meaning, and wry, reports on life in a legendary African American enclave in Sag Harbor, Long Island. He and his brother, the sons of a doctor and a lawyer, attend private school in Manhattan and spend each summer here with a circle of friends, this year moving on from bicycles to cars, arcade games to ogling girls. Benji muses over the fact that he and his friends, black boys with beach houses, define paradox, and frets over myriad anxieties, including his inability to keep up with the new handshakes. Whitehead's ardor for pop culture launches exuberantly caustic ruminations on music, fashion, and TV, while he goes overboard describing Benji's ice-cream-shop job. Benji's stipulations of what is cool and uncool create a moral equation, while the buzz of summer delights conceals the pain of racism and class bias, which lurk like jagged rocks beneath the sun-dazzled sea. Yet, just as Benji can't swim, Whitehead sticks to the frothy shoreline and avoids the deep. Caution lowers the resonance of this masterfully told tale, but ups the pleasure, making for an unusually generous, wisely funny novel about good kids and a society's muddled attempt to come of age.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Now that we've got a post-black president, all the rest of the post-blacks can be unapologetic as we reshape the iconography of blackness. For so long, the definition of blackness was dominated by the '60s street-fighting militancy of the Jesses and the irreverent one-foot-out-the-ghetto angry brilliance of the Pryors and the nihilistic, unrepentantly ghetto, new-age thuggishness of the 50 Cents. A decade ago they called post-blacks Oreos because we didn't think blackness equaled ghetto, didn't mind having white influencers, didn't seem full of anger about the past. We were comfortable employing blackness as a grace note rather than as our primary sound. Post-blackness sees blackness not as a dogmatic code worshiping at the altar of the hood and the struggle but as an opensource document, a trope with infinite uses. The term began in the art world with a class of black artists who were adamant about not being labeled black artists even as their work redefined notions of blackness. Now the meme is slowly expanding into the wider consciousness. For so long we were stamped inauthentic and bullied into an inferiority complex by the harder brothers and sisters, but now it's our turn to take center stage. Now Kanye, Questlove, Santigold, Zadie Smith and Colson Whitehead can do blackness their way without fear of being branded pseudo or incognegro. So it's a perfect moment for Whitehead's memoiristic fourth novel, "Sag Harbor," a coming-of-age story about the Colsonesque 15-year-old Benji, who wishes people would just call him Ben. He's a Smiths-loving, Brooks Brothers-wearing son of moneyed blacks who summer in Long Island and recognize the characters on "The Cosby Show" as kindred spirits. "According to the world we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses. A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were," Whitehead writes. "What you call paradox, I call myself." For Benji's family, confident of progress, the black national anthem is "Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now." BENJI is a nerdy, easily embarrassed teenager, still in braces, whose attempt to become his own person is seen in his efforts to pull away from Reggie, his younger brother and longtime shadow. Like so many adolescents in life and in literature, Benji is trying to figure out who he is but doesn't quite know where to look. We see him flow through a summer in Sag Harbor, that section of the Hamptons where many black doctors and lawyers have homes, and follow him from Memorial Day (when he's waiting for the rest of his little crew to arrive from the city) to Labor Day (when the lawn mowers go quiet). It's the summer of 1985 - the hip-hop sex symbol Lisa Lisa comes into the ice cream store where Benji works, and New Coke is introduced to hell-frozen-over dismay: "It was inconceivable, like tampering with the laws of nature. Hey, let's try Gravity-Free Tuesdays." Whitehead's delicious language and sarcastic, clever voice fit this teenager who's slowly constructing himself. "Sag Harbor" is not "How I became a writer"; there's no hint of Benji's destiny beyond his sharp-eyed way of looking at things, his writerly voice and his desire to provide a historical and sociological context for blacks in the Hamptons. Still, with the story meandering like a teenager's attention, the book feels more like a memoir than a traditional plot-driven novel. It's easy to come away thinking not much happens - Whitehead has said as much - but "Sag Harbor" mirrors life, which is also plotless. It's an inner monologue, a collection of stories about a classic teenage summer where there's some cool stuff and some tedium and Benji grows in minute ways he can't yet see. Benji lives in a world not unlike Charlie Brown's, where adults are mostly offstage. His parents work in the city all week, visiting on weekends, so Benji's social life reaches its apex on Thursdays, when all the "ill" stuff goes down. Of course, Benji and his crew aren't terribly raucous: the illest thing to happen is a BB gun war, where guess-who gets shot in the eye. This leads to one of the book's tensest scenes, as Benji tries to extricate the BB with "old-fashioned razor blades, the ones people use to kill themselves." He fails. Whites are mostly offstage too, but for these characters, as for many blacks in the upper middle class, there's a constant worry about the white gaze. "You didn't, for example, walk down Main Street with a watermelon under your arm. Even if you had a pretty good reason. Like, you were going to a potluck and each person had to bring an item and your item just happened to be a watermelon, luck of the draw, and you wrote this on a sign so everyone would understand the context, and as you walked down Main Street you held the sign in one hand and the explained watermelon in the other, all casual, perhaps nodding between the watermelon and the sign for extra emphasis if you made eye contact. This would not happen. We were on display." Still, even in successful and ambitious post-black families, kids are taught in no uncertain terms not to take any mess from whites. An undercurrent of abuse in Benji's house - Dad insults Mom in front of her friends, for example - spills over when Benji doesn't challenge a boy who drags a finger down his cheek and says, "Look - it doesn't come off." When his father learns that Benji didn't punch the boy, he surmises that Benji was afraid of being punched back. So he uses shock therapy: "His fast fast hand struck me across the face and iron rolled around in my head and my cheek pulsed with heat and felt like it had swollen up to twice its size." Benji's father punches him in the face again and again, each time demanding, "Can he hit you harder than this?" Through most of "Sag Harbor" Benji learns and grows very little, but here the moral is unmistakable: "The lesson was, Don't be afraid of being hit, but over the years I took it as, No one can hurt you more than I can." He goes back and punches the boy in the face. The autobiography has been an integral part of African-American literature since before Frederick Douglass. Most examples - Richard Wright's "Black Boy," Claude Brown's "Manchild in the Promised Land," Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Kody Scott's "Monster" - could have been subtitled "My Journey Out of Hell." They document the horror of being black and enslaved or segregated or impoverished or imprisoned. But Whitehead's Benji starts with tremendous class advantages and summers in a vacation paradise where life doesn't assault him but rather affords him the time to figure out who he wants to be. Benji may be an outlier, but he is not alone. It's time for us to hear more post-black stories like his. Touré is the author of a story collection, a novel and, most recently, a nonfiction collection, "Never Drank the Kool-Aid."
Guardian Review
The summer of 1985 is a halcyon one for Ben, 15, and his brother Reggie, 14, left alone in the family's vacation house. The town of Sag Harbor, New York, is the plain face of "the Hamptons", one of the weirder places on earth. In winter it is bleak potato farms, in summer the desk and playpen of writers, actors and arseholes from the world around: in Ben's words, "the Hamptonite Undead", who stop at nothing to satisfy their opulent summery urges. Strange and brave that a community was founded here by black professionals from the city in the 1930s. "I'll wager on this," Ben says, "the sunsets closed the deal for that first generation . . . my grandparents and their crew . . . that first generation asked, Can we make it work? Will they allow us to have this? It doesn't matter what the world says, they answered each other. This place is ours." Whitehead proves himself, among many other things, a poet of the American summer and its aspirations. In these cherished, toiled-for houses, Ben and his city friends live summer and adolescence parallel to the rest of the world. The place means everything to their parents, and to them. To let anything, even money worries, "interfere with Sag, your shit was seriously amiss". Within days of being left in charge, the two brothers have eaten all the frozen dinners they expected would sustain them. So Reggie throws himself on the mercy of Burger King and Ben gets a job at Jonni Waffle, a wonderful, nauseatingly evoked emporium of American dessert bilge - "the beginning of my exile from decent people". Yet in Whitehead's hands this place, reeking of burning sucrose, is the perfect theatre for every anxiety of puberty: monetary, digestive, racial, sexual and criminal. The nostalgia the young have for family things is acutely done: the dependable look of rakes in the basement, or how it feels to gather up your stuff at the chilly end of a day on the beach. And there is a guilty, haunted Ben who looks down on his maturing self from outside, a kid never allowed to forget he goes to a fancy white school - "most of the year it was like I'd been blindfolded and thrown down a well". Day to day, Ben broils in the anxiety of any 15-year-old: "The new handshakes were out, shaming me with their permutations and slippery routines. Slam, grip, flutter, snap. Or was it slam, flutter, grip, snap? . . . Devised in the underground soul laboratories of Harlem, pounded out in the blacker-than-thou sweatshops of the South Bronx, the new handshakes always had me faltering in embarrassment . . . I had all summer to get it right, unless someone went back to the city and returned with some new variation that spread like a virus, and which my strong dork constitution produced countless antibodies against." For Ben is a dork. The musical currency in his milieu may be rap, but he listens to the Smiths (as well as alluding to his Dungeons & Dragons past - "a means of perpetuating virginity"). But this remarkable novel goes far beyond gentle musings on awkward youth. This is Ben on the meaning, to him, of the cataclysmic shift from rap to hip-hop: "Something happened that changed the terms and we went from fighting (I'll knock that grin off your face) to annihilation (I will wipe you from this Earth). How we got from here to there are the key passages in the history of young black men that no one cares to write. We live it instead." In this elegiac, spirited prose there are echoes of Melville, one of the first to write about Sag, and others, too: Thurber's ability to celebrate a troubled family through satire, and Cheever's melancholy geography of class. Compared with his own brilliantly stark, insinuating writing in The Colossus of New York , Whitehead's language here is relaxed and playful, a tribute to youth. But Ben's take on life is a fond, proud, nervy shout, and a triumph of rueful reason. Todd McEwen's Who Sleeps With Katz is published by Granta. Caption: article-mcewenwhitehead.1 The summer of 1985 is a halcyon one for Ben, 15, and his brother Reggie, 14, left alone in the family's vacation house. The town of Sag Harbor, New York, is the plain face of "the Hamptons", one of the weirder places on earth. In winter it is bleak potato farms, in summer the desk and playpen of writers, actors and arseholes from the world around: in Ben's words, "the Hamptonite Undead", who stop at nothing to satisfy their opulent summery urges. Day to day, Ben broils in the anxiety of any 15-year-old: "The new handshakes were out, shaming me with their permutations and slippery routines. Slam, grip, flutter, snap. Or was it slam, flutter, grip, snap? . . . Devised in the underground soul laboratories of Harlem, pounded out in the blacker-than-thou sweatshops of the South Bronx, the new handshakes always had me faltering in embarrassment . . . I had all summer to get it right, unless someone went back to the city and returned with some new variation that spread like a virus, and which my strong dork constitution produced countless antibodies against." For Ben is a dork. The musical currency in his milieu may be rap, but he listens to the Smiths (as well as alluding to his Dungeons & Dragons past - "a means of perpetuating virginity"). - Todd McEwen.
Kirkus Review
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice. Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier workin particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)he'll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family's summer retreat of New York's Sag Harbor. "According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses," writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There's an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist's eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary. Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead's earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Fifteen-year-old Benji has spent every summer since he can remember in Sag Harbor, NY. The rest of the year, he's a black preppie from Manhattan, with a doctor father and a lawyer mother and a younger brother, Reggie. It is 1985, and Reggie gets a job at Burger King, leaving Benji (who would prefer to be called Ben) to hang with his summer friends (the term posse wasn't invented yet), other black prep school refugees. Not a lot happens during those three months. Or does everything happen, all that matters to an insecure, nerdy teen just beginning to recognize the man he might become? Scooping ice cream at Jonni Waffle, riding to the "white beach" with the one guy who's got a car, trying to crash a Lisa Lisa concert at the hip club, and kissing a girl and copping a feel are significant events in a life that encompasses generations of folks who called Sag Harbor home. Wonderful, evocative writing, as always, from Whitehead (Apex Hides the Hurt); male readers especially will relate. Highly recommended. [Prepub Alert, LJ 12/08.]-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Notions of Roller-Rink Infinity First you had to settle the question of out. When did you get out? Asking this was showing off, even though anyone you could brag to had received the same gift and had come by it the same way you did. Same sun wrapped in shiny paper, same soft benevolent sky, same gravel road that sooner or later skinned you. It was hard not to believe it belonged to you more than anyone else, made for you and waiting all these years for you to come along. Everyone felt that way. We were grateful just to be standing there in that heat after such a long bleak year in the city. When did you get out? was the sound of our trap biting shut; we took the bait year after year, pure pinned joy in the town of Sag Harbor. Then there was the next out: How long are you out for?--and the competition had begun. The magic answer was Through Labor Day or The Whole Summer. Anything less was to signal misfortune. Out for a weekend at the start of the season, to open up the house, sweep cracks, that was okay. But only coming out for a month? A week? What was wrong, were you having financial difficulties? Everyone had financial difficulties, sure, but to let it interfere with Sag, your shit was seriously amiss. Out for a week, a month, and you were allowing yourself to be cheated by life. Ask, How long are you out for? and a cloud wiped the sun. The question trailed a whiff of autumn. All answers contemplated the end, the death of summer at its very beginning. Still waiting for the bay to warm up so you could go for a swim and already picturing it frozen over. Labor Day suddenly not so far off at all. The final out was one-half information-gathering and one-half prayer: Who else is out? The season had begun, we were proof of it, instrument of it, but things couldn't really get started until all the players took their marks, bounding down driveways, all gimme-fives. The others were necessary, and we needed word. The person standing before you in pleated salmon shorts might say, "I talked to him on Wednesday and he said they were coming out." They were always the first ones out, never missed June like their lives depended on it. (This was true.) Someone might offer, "Their lawn was cut." A cut lawn was an undeniable omen of impending habitation, today or tomorrow. "Saw a car in their driveway." Even better. There was no greater truth than a car in a driveway. A car in the driveway was an invitation to knock on the door and get down to the business of summer. Knock on that door and watch it relent under your knuckles--once you were out, the door stayed unlocked until you closed up the house. Once we're all out, we can begin. My name is Ben. In the summer of 1985 I was fifteen years old. My brother, Reggie, was fourteen. As for when we got out, we got out that morning, hour and a half flat, having beat the traffic. Over the course of a summer, you heard a lot of different strategies of how to beat the traffic, or at least slap it around a little. There were those who ditched the office early on Friday afternoon, casually letting their co-workers know the reason for their departure in order to enjoy a little low-pressure envy. Others headed back to the city late Sunday evening, choking every last pulse of joy from the weekend with cocoa-buttered hands. They stopped to grab a bite and watched the slow red surge outside the restaurant window while dragging clam strips through tartar sauce--soon, soon, not yet--until the coast was clear. My father's method was easy and brutal--hit the road at five in the morning so that we were the only living souls on the Long Island Expressway, making a break for it in the haunted dark. Every so often my mother said, "There's no traffic," as if it were a miracle. Well, it wasn't really dark, June sunrises are up and at 'em, but I always remember those drives that way--memory has a palette and broad brush. Perhaps I r Excerpted from Sag Harbor: A Novel by Colson Whitehead All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
