By That Soft and Shining Sea

The summertime urge to read a book each week has kicked off again, some impulse likely formented by the summer reading contests at the public libraries I frequented as a kid: Milwaukee East, Shorewood, and near my Grandparents' summer home in Lake Geneva, WI. Last summer I hummed along quite nicely at a book a week until I got sunk by an overly ambitious stab at a history of the Works Progress Administration, then was ultimately done in by somehow losing the copy of Savage Detectives I'd borrowed from the town of Shorewood. (I've since funded a replacement.)

I read Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days a few years back, which I'd picked up because I dig Americana and because I knew of Whitehead from reviews of The Intuitionist, his first novel about elevator inspectors. The Intuitionist has been on my to-read list since it was published in 1998. I used to walk it around the Harvard Bookstore, but somehow never took it home.

John Henry Days was a good read -- probably also a summer book for me -- though ultimately it has more to do with media junkets and Arts & Entertainment-section reporting than with issues of race, folklore, and American history. Whitehead can be lyrical when he wants to be, and he's a fine sociological observer of pop culture, much of which comes through in Sag Harbor.

Sag Harbor is a slice-of-life/coming-of-age/boys-being-boys sort of novel that ambles through Summer 1985, following Benjii and assorted friends in an African-American section of Long Island. They waste time, pick on each other, work stupid jobs, and obsess over music and style in a manner typical of teenagers through the ages, and watching all of this is fun because of both the familiarity and the foriegnness of Benjii's experiences. It's a bit like The Fortress of Solitude on vacation, or The Brief Life of Oscar Wao crossed with a John Cusack movie from the 1980's. And, to steal a line from a review I once read of Frank Browning's Apples, you can read this book lying in a hammock while a dog licks your feet without any loss of comprehension. It's fun and nostalgic and not at all ashamed to be so.

As it would need to be, it's a very evocative book. Whitehead explores what he calls the "heyday of Dag" (as a response to a slight or an insult) and chronicles the arrival of New Coke, but he's also able to call up the smell of a freshly-formed waffle cone in a resort town's upscale ice cream parlor or to recall the experience of lying in a cottage bed and knowing -- by the way traffic headlights cross the ceiling of the room -- that one's parents have returned, an experience I'm not even sure I had but which feels as rich and as real as anything. Whitehead captures kids coming to the end of their structureless summers, kids who are aware that they don't have much longer to live in such a carefree and formless way, kids who are trying to make the most of the time they have left before adulthood and college and work and so on. Sag Harbor in the mid-eighties seems not all that different from Lake Geneva, WI, in about the same era.

On top of all that, the characters Whitehead creates are black kids with summer homes, upper- and middle-class African American teens who are largely underrepresented in American literature. Sag Harbor presents the sort of dual consciousness such a situation suggests, and creates in each character a clear but not overstated reaction to what to some may have seemed, pre-November 2008, to be a contradiction.

It's a summer book, a good one to get your first stamp in the Super Summer Reader program at your local library. (Though you may want to wait until after September, for the full effect of the sandy dunes and salty air evokes.)