![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Whitehead, who won a MacArthur Grant and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, calls “Sag Harbor” his “Autobiographical Fourth Novel, as opposed to the standard Autobiographical First Novel.” Like Benji, Whitehead was a Manhattan prep school student whose family owned a summer house on the east end of Long Island in Sag Harbor, although he says the characters and most of the incidents are fiction. They are the sons of hard-working, successful families who come out from New York City year after year to relax and reconnect. The crucial difference is that Benji Cooper, the narrator of the story, is black, as are all of his friends and the seasonal residents in his stretch of Sag Harbor (“black boys with beach houses”). “Sag Harbor,” Colson Whitehead’s winning, witty fourth novel, takes on a subject that is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time - the summer migration of city residents to a beach community, where the teenage children take jobs at the ice cream shop and get into the kind of trouble that not-so-bad boys do, playing with BB guns, avoiding the barbecues of their parents, coaxing elders into buying them beer, and trying to sneak into a club when their favorite band comes to town. ![]()
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