1 6 4 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W A M Y H U N G E R F O R D ‘‘Still going on, all of it, still going on!’’ – Philip Larkin, ‘‘To the Sea’’ Colson Whitehead, born in 1969, would have been five years old and paddling on the other lip of the Atlantic when Philip Larkin wrote of ‘‘the miniature gaiety of seasides’’ in ‘‘To the Sea,’’ the opening poem of High Windows (1974). This poem comes to mind as I consider Whitehead’s latest novel, Sag Harbor, not only because the novel takes place at a seaside (or, more precisely, Soundside ) resort town, or because it is a novel of miniature gaiety, but also because this autobiographical novel exudes the kind of longing that Larkin’s poem, and the whole of the lovely High Windows collection, makes palpable. The challenge for Whitehead, as it was for Larkin, is to look back at youth from the perspective of middle S a g H a r b o r, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday, 288 pp., $24.95) 1 6 5 R age – or, in Whitehead’s case, nearly middle age – and to make something out of the undeniably ordinary time he sees back there. Whitehead’s Benji, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of the novel, stands between childhood and the independence signified by college ; Whitehead himself stands between those young enough to be his children and those old enough to be the parents of the fifteenyear -old Benji. Or we might say, fifty seems to be the new forty: forty, for this generation, is not quite there in the way fifty is, not quite the moment when you become the replacement of your parents, rather in the way fifteen has failed to arrive at a driver’s license. As the personal and the generational stories coincide – here, Generation X at fifteen and at forty – we arrive at a significant point of the book, its question: What does it mean to be the child of the first generation of successful African American professionals? And then the corollary questions: What is it like to be that person in the 1980s, on the East Coast? What does this child become once he is no longer defined by the worlds his parents built? Can he ever not be defined by the worlds they built, even when he leaves them? These are announced in the novel as Whitehead’s specific versions of the typical questions of the Bildungsroman; they are, to read early reviews, what make Benji’s particular coming of age worth noting in the form of a novel. The novel makes the case that to be a black elite GenXer is to be forever between identities, so that the Bildungsroman, with the classic emphasis on betweenness , is the perfect genre for this telling of an important demographic story. The eventfulness of the demographic story in the context of American history balances the uneventfulness of Benji’s summer. Whitehead wisely allows the summer its miniature quality, those minute changes in Benji: he masters a new handshake or two, finally has a friend with a car, gets a job at Jonnie WaΔe, does a few stupid things (think BB guns). He kisses a girl. He spends his first summer not feeling like the twin of his little brother Reggie, ten months younger, with whom he has been ‘‘joined not at the hip or spleen or nervous system but at that more important place – that spot on your self where you meet the world.’’ As Whitehead himself notes, not much happens in this novel, and Benji is not wiser at the end than he is at the beginning. What drives the novel 1 6 6 H U N G E R F O R D Y forward are the local dramas in Benji’s life that play out on the stage of each chapter. These are skillfully plotted and, for the most part, well-paced within those formal divisions. And it is driven throughout by a poetic, besotted attention to the materials and gestures of 1980s East Coast...
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Sep 1, 2023
Laura Pritchett 
Open Access