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Some might say it’s shortchanging Colson Whitehead to call his appearance at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on July 11 a “homecoming.”
After all, not only is he a well-regarded author who spent much of his childhood in the village, he is the only writer around who can offer a novel titled “Sag Harbor” that is about ... well, childhood in Sag Harbor.
And it is a successful book to boot. Soon after it was published by Doubleday in April, the novel was reviewed favorably on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Book Review, which remains a capstone experience for the author. “We had some hints, such as the Times sending a photographer out to shoot my picture, but my attitude was, ‘Don’t jinx it,’” recalled Mr. Whitehead. “But when my editor at Doubleday called me to give me a heads-up, I was still shocked. I know how rare that is. And I will always remember that moment.”
“Sag Harbor” received a coveted starred review in Publishers Weekly. Booklist reported that the story was “masterfully told,” and Kirkus Reviews said that it was Mr. Whitehead’s “warmest novel to date.” Tongue in cheek, the writer refers to the book as his “autobiographical fourth novel,” as opposed to the tradition followed by Thomas Wolfe and many others of writing about one’s own life in a first novel.
This would seem like a dream come true for someone who intended to write about his childhood from the time of being a child, but this is not quite the case for Mr. Whitehead.
“When I was a teenager I wanted to write Stephen King-like novels about vampires,” he said. “I had no idea what kind of good material I was sitting on top of. From the approach to my previous work as a fiction writer, it was clear that I shied away from material that was very personal and close to my own experience. It took me a couple of books to get over being self-conscious. Also, I needed some distance of time and experience to fully realize how unique the place was and figure out how to shape it into a story.”
For those who are or were longtime residents of the village (including this writer, who lived for 11 years in the Hillcrest Terrace section), “Sag Harbor” brings back a lot of memories. The story takes place during the summer of 1985 and is narrated by Benji Cooper, whose family lives in one of the historically African-American neighborhoods that were first developed in the 1940s and ’50s. He and his brother, Reggie, are the only black students in an elite prep school in Manhattan, but once school is out the Coopers head east to re-join the community of African-American professionals who have spent summers together for decades.
“Sag Harbor” is reminiscent of “To Kill a Mockingbird” in that during this particular summer Benji is going to leave a big part of his childhood behind.
While this is fiction, it is fun to note the true-life details. Residents of Ninevah Beach, Azurest, and the other black neighborhoods gather and walk along Havens Beach. Benji and a couple of other friends work at the Big Olaf ice cream shop on the Long Wharf. There are shortcuts through woods to the village that, inevitably, no longer exist because houses have been built over them.
Another interesting exercise when reading the novel is to try to suss out how much of Benji is Mr. Whitehead—whose family has lived in Sag Harbor for more than 40 years—and vice-versa.
“It is unavoidable,” he conceded. “If Philip Roth is writing about a Jewish neighborhood in Newark, it’s autobiographical and people will speculate about what is actually real and what is fake. So too with my book. Obviously, it is factual to portray Sag Harbor in the 1980s, the streets and the shops and the pop culture of the time—music, TV shows, and movies. The language of the ice cream shop is based on my working there. Obviously, the Long Wharf is the Long Wharf. But much of what happens to the main character is different from many of my personal experiences.”
Benji easily settles into the community of African-American friends and neighbors. It is a relief from existing in the predominantly white world he lives in the rest of the year. He enjoys the familiarity of place, yet Sag Harbor is changing and Benji tells us that already he is “nostalgic for everything big and small. Nostalgic for what never happened and nostalgic for what will be, looking forward to looking back on a time when things got easier.”
One might assume that after writing three earlier novels—“The Intuitionist,” “John Henry Days,” and “Apex Hides the Hurt”—Mr. Whitehead, who now lives in Brooklyn, would have found it easier to write a book that borders on memoir. And much of the research is based on memories.
Yet he says that all four of his novels were “difficult, but difficult in different ways. In my first book I was learning how to write a novel, and that was a big impediment. With this one there was the first-person narrator, which I hadn’t done before, there was not a thriller-type plot so I had to figure out how to keep it going based almost solely on characters, and challenges with structure.”
He added: “It was also a lot of fun, though, because Benji has a good sense of humor and it was fun to see that world of Sag Harbor in 1985 through his unique perspective. He was a good vehicle for joke-making.”
And a good vehicle for experimenting with the narrative, because the voice is not completely that of a teenager. “It is an adult perspective shaping a future experience,” Mr. Whitehead said. “Benji is in it, yet his adult self is looking back at his experience of almost 25 years ago. It would be unrealistic to have a 15-year-old be so aware of what is going on and processing it.
“I was definitely clueless as a teenager about a lot of what was going on around me. Part of the fun of this book was having the adult self look back at Benji and try to help him along, because he can do only so much at that age.”
As part of the publicity for “Sag Harbor,” Mr. Whitehead spent most of May on the road, on a book tour. That audiences did not have any knowledge of the village of the title was not an obstacle.
“All books take place in an alien terrain, which is the author’s imagination,” he pointed out. “It does not work if people cannot see themselves in Benji’s situation and his misadventures. So while they might not relate specifically to Sag Harbor because they don’t know it, hopefully they relate to his experiences and feelings as a teenager trying to figure out his life. But as I found out, there are transplanted Hamptonites all over the place. I was in Berkeley and Santa Cruz and Michigan and people were coming up to me and saying, ‘Oh yeah, I was in Sag Harbor in the ’80s.’”
Colson Whitehead will read from his latest novel, “Sag Harbor,” at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday, July 11, at 6 p.m. For information, call Canio’s at 725-4926.
on Jun 30, 2009