Colson Whitehead's novel, Sag Harbor, is a story about growing up about a youthful black teen set in 1985. Published in 2009, the novel investigates themes of race, class, and culture as the protagonist explores a summer spent among well off generally white vacationers on Long Island. Whitehead is an author whose essays have showed up in the New York Times, Harper's and the New Yorker, and writer of grant winning books, for example, The Intuitionist and The Underground Railroad.
The tale opens as protagonist Benji Cooper and his brother Reggie leave their for the mostly white Manhattan prep school for the family beach house at Sag Harbor on Long Island. Benji is glad to abandon school: there, he is an outcast, ridiculed for his enthusiasm for horror movies and Dungeons and Dragons. The boys routinely spend summers at Sag Harbor, and are anticipating seeing companions who additionally have summer houses in the territory. The brothers' parents drive to and fro to the city for work, leaving the boys to a great extent unaided on weekdays.
Rather, the boys have the run of the spot. They spend time with an old companion, NP, and find that a boy on the external hover of their social gathering, Randy, has his own car. Auto proprietorship drives Randy to the focal point of the gathering. Presently he can carry his friends to places they could not without easily get to by foot or on a bike. They travel to a far off beach house on bits of gossip that some place on Long Island is where the girls sunbathe topless. They do not discover the supposed beach house.
Benji gets a new job at the ice cream parlor to fund his suppers and summer adventures while his parents are away. Reggie likewise gets a new job at Burger King. They have another impulse to keep themselves occupied: their father is a drunkard, subject to appalling scenes of tipsiness and fierceness. Reggie is a successive objective.
The proprietor of the ice cream shop is Dominican, and the boys contend over his racial character, taking note of that he will in general support employing black workers yet in addition treats them patronizingly. Benji has been finding out about the works of W.E.B. DuBois at school and is finding racial cognizance. Participation at a for the mostly white prep school implies Benji and his brother are to a great extent oblivious of black culture, and Benji feels secluded, not so much belonging with one gathering or the other. The ice cream retailer gives Benji a congratulatory gesture that Benji finds belittling; he seeks retribution by purposely leaving the cooler open during a power blackout. He later discovers that the proprietor is really black, and his activities are not propelled by dormant bigotry.
Benji's friends began playing with BB guns, setting up focuses to fire at in their patios. One evening, they choose to have a BB gun war. The boys set out rules to submit to before the BB shootout, including that they are not to focus on the face, and Randy's gun ought not to be siphoned more than twice. In the warmth of the "battle," in any case, Randy does not comply with the guidelines and shoots Benji in the face, close to his eye. He is mostly safe, however the BB pellet is held up underneath his skin for the rest of his life.
Later in the summer, the boys find out about a show going to be held at the local nightclub. They are very youthful to go, however they each bring forth plans to sneak in any case. Benji purchases a ticket and plans to dress the way his white, preppy classmates back in Manhattan do, trusting that this will make him look mature enough to be conceded inside. His other companions cajole older cousins into claiming to be their dates, trusting that their very own ages will not be addressed, yet their arrangement comes up short, and they are kicked out at the entrance. Benji pulls off his very own plan and gets inside with his companion NP.
A girl Benji recalls from past summers, Melanie, returns to Sag Harbor. She has not appeared in years since her parents separated and had to sell the house as they isolated their funds. Presently, Melanie's mother has leased a house for the remainder of the summer. Melanie is dating Benji's friend Nick yet searches out Benji frequently, helping him to remember shared recollections from years spent together on the beach house, and appears to be exceptionally partial to him.
Afterward, Benji takes her to the family's old beach house house, which once belonged to his grandparents. Years before, this house was the place Benji and his family remained throughout the summer, yet when his grandparents died, the house went to his aunt. The house Benji's family summers in now is an alternate property his grandparents once claimed.
Benji recollects the glad summers he once spent at the old summer house, and reveals his explanation behind bringing Melanie there: it is the ideal spot to make another summer memory, the memory of his first kiss.
Summer closes with a community Labor Day party. Benji attends and watches the individuals around him. He thinks about the generations of vacationers that preceded him, and the ones in front of him. He envisions the individual he will turn out to be sometime in the not so distant future, and feels guaranteed that Sag Harbor summers will consistently be a piece of his life.
A New York Times review noticed that the book addresses a rising generation of princely youthful black people: while dark families with beach houses was exceedingly uncommon in 1985, the year the book is set, today is progressively normal. The book is Whitehead's very own fictionalized adaptation generally advantaged youth; he went to a prep school in Manhattan, traveled at Sag Harbor each summer, and went on to college at Harvard. Sag Harbor was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award.
