Sag Harbor
Back in February, an article on certified “genius” (at least, according to whomever hands out the MacArthur grants) author Colson Whitehead appeared in The Daily Beast with the eye-catching title – “The Great Summer Read Is Almost Here.” The reporter was referring to Whitehead’s newest novel titled Sag Harbor (out today), an autobiographical bildungsroman about two black teenagers finding ways to entertain themselves during a long summer in the African-American neighborhood of Sag Harbor in the Hamptons, Long Island. Whitehead’s previous novels, including The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, have been critical darlings, but can Sag Harbor live up to Whitehead’s growing reputation and the expectation to be the great literary summer read of ’09?
Keep in mind what Benjamin Alsup wrote in his recent Esquire profile of Whitehead: “Everybody digs Colson Whitehead. Since we’re talking literary fiction here, let it be understood that when I say everybody, I mean hardly anyone. I mean aging former English majors who wear bookish specs. I mean editors at The New Yorker and reviewers at The New York Times. Try to find a bad review. Google your eyes out. Even when heavyweights criticize his work, they also go to great lengths to assure their readers that they very much dig the author.”
You can pick up your own copy of Sag Harbor today, but here’s what some of the major reviewers are saying about Whitehead’s latest:
“You can’t help but admire Whitehead’s writerly gifts, but there’s something idling and indolent about his method here. Sag Harbor reminded me, not in a good way, of The Colossus of New York, Whitehead’s book-length love letter to his home city: stylistically virtuosic but stubbornly hard to finish.”
- Taylor Antrim, Los Angeles Times
“What’s best about Sag Harbor is the utter and sometimes mortifying accuracy of its descriptive details. (His father’s only radio choices for the ride out to Sag Harbor were easy listening or angrily Afrocentric talk radio, Benji says. “Is there any wonder my dreams were troubled?”)”
- Janet Maslin, New York Times
“He seems post-conflicted, awfully comfy in whatever skin he’s in. … Doesn’t the novel demand conflict? Man versus Man. Man versus Nature. Man versus Himself. The post-conflicted male, I dig him. The post-conflicted novelist? Eh. He leaves me a little cold.”
- Benjamin Alsup, Esquire
“[I]t’s remarkably genial for a book about the trauma of finding yourself, not to mention about being black in America.”
- Craig Seligman, Bloomberg
You can also check out these other (largely positive) reviews of Sag Harbor:
Elle
Publishers Weekly
Kirkus Reviews
And you’ll find Books & Authors’ profiles of his previous novels, Apex Hides the Hurt and John Henry Days (selected by our subject matter experts), here and here.
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