Sag Harbor is the fourth novel by highly-regarded writer Colson Whitehead and represents something of a departure from his previous works in both tone, style and subject matter. The story is a semi-autobiographical account of an African-America teen from New York spending the summer in the titular beach community with his all-white friends from the prep school he attends back home.
The year is 1985 and far from being a ghetto thug playing the fish out of water game or trying the whole six degrees of separation con, the novel’s protagonist Benji fits in quite well with these other privileged kids from well-to-do families for who barely seeing their kids all summer—if at all—is in no way considered out of ordinary. It is precisely this lack of authority and oversight—parental or otherwise—which provides the opportunity for Benji to make contact with other young black teens with affluent parents who own beach houses. In a time and place in which two black teens wearing Brooks Brothers suits invariably produced startled reactions, Sag Harbor allows Whitehead to use his own personal history to analyze the evolution of race relations at the dawn of the age of Obama during which the novel was composed.
Sag Harbor—which is structured almost like a series of connected short stories rather than a cohesively integrated novel—became a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.
