Steve Reads

It’s worth declaring up front that nothing much happens in Sag Harbor. Nothing much really could happen: it’s a story about teenagers left alone for a summer at their families’ beach houses on Long Island. Teenagers at a beach house aren’t going to stop a cabal of evildoers intent on destroying the world; they’re not going to uncover secret biblical signs hidden in Renaissance paintings. At best they’re going to work at an ice-cream shop and discover the hidden mysteries of the waffle-cone maker. And so they do.

Which isn’t to say, by any stretch of the imagination, that Sag Harbor is boring. Quite to the contrary. Every paragraph carries one of Colson Whitehead’s flights of stylistic fancy, or another charming and spot-on exploration of the teenage mind. Sag Harbor is written from the perspective of an older man — late 30s, early 40s — looking back on his teens, trying to get into his younger brain and understand its motivations and its misconceptions.

This is a crucial summer in the life of teenage boys: at its start, they channel their teenage desire to be top dog into acts of violence: getting into inconsequential fistfights with one another or destroying things with BB guns. By the end, it’s all about girls. If someone questions something you say in front of a girl you fancy, not only your knowledge but your very manhood is on trial. Hence this hilariously accurate sketch of what happens when one of the narrator’s friends thinks he’s quoting “sacadiliac” (he means “sacroiliac”) from a rap song:

We all laughed except for NP, who said, “Saca-what?”

“My nut sack,” he said, gesturing at me for backup.

I said, “I read a book about Sagaponac by Honoré de Ballsack,” but that only confused things more so Bobby explained about the big brown nuts and the rest. “Look it up.”

“In what?” NP asked. He was right — no one had a dictionary out there. Maybe an old Scrabble dictionary, missing half its pages and frothing with silverfish, but that was it. “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars you’re wrong,” he said. From time to time, this competition emerged between NP and Bobby over who was the alpha dog in this double date, complicated by the fact that Bobby had the car keys. …

Bobby couldn’t back down. His girl was watching. His girl’s cousin was watching. … The money was in the bag — if you can’t trust a nerd with a big word, who can you trust?

Even adult drama loses some amplitude on Sag Harbor:

The bridge to North Haven was a long white frown before us. From time to time, suicidal painters and playwrights (few artists from other disciplines partook for some reason) flung themself from its concrete heights, but the water wasn’t very deep, and they usually ended up being dragged by a gaffer’s hook onto a passing motorboat, or wading out dejectedly, pissed that they’d lost their wallet.

Whitehead’s style here cracks me up. No one can take Sag Harbor very seriously — least of all the reader, who’s too busy laughing at that wallet.

The narrator, known to his chagrin as “Benji,” is looking back with a smirk on how foolish a little kid he was. At the same time, he realizes just how foolish he still is, and even his younger self can’t resist a look back — as when a girl reminds teenage Benji that he was her first kiss, many years before:

It seemed impossible not to remember something like that. The first time a girl put her lips on yours. What kind of chump forgot being a five-year-old mack?

You’re going to laugh from start to finish while reading Sag Harbor, because Colson Whitehead is a brilliant prose stylist. Take it to the beach with you; smile warmly at the teenage boys roaming the boardwalk, as they try to impress their girlfriends and take this consequence-free summer so seriously.