Review by New York Times 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."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by 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
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by 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
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by 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.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book 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.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
