By Imani Perry

Sag Harbor is the first-person narrative of teenaged Benji Cooper and his relationship to the place and people of his summers: Sag Harbor, New York.

It is the mid-1980s, and Sag Harbor is a relatively unknown oasis for the upper middle class of black America (along with Idlewild, Michigan, Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, Cape May, Delaware, and a few even more obscure locations.) However, unlike many other entrees into privileged black life, there are neither apologetics nor hubris offered to the reader.

Benji is matter-of-fact about the oddity of his life, saying “Black boys with beach houses. It could mess with your head sometimes, if you were the susceptible sort… And if it messed with you head, got under your brown skin, there were some typical and well-known remedies.”… No. 1: “You could embrace the beach part — revel in the luxury, the perception of status, wallow without care in what it meant to be born in America with money; or the appearance of money, as the case may be. No apologies.”….No. 2: “You could embrace the black part — take some idea you had about what real blackness was, and make theater of it, your 24-7 one-man show.”

Benji’s third remedy, the one he chooses for himself, is to “embrace the contradiction.”

And thus we have a protagonist who offers pitch perfect examples of Black Gen X adolescent expressions, often beginning with “You big…” and ending “with your monkey A#@” but who also seeks to be dressed in the perfectly worn charcoal-black t-shirt style of punk rock clubbers. He is the contradiction and yet does not seem “torn between two worlds.”

He bears no racial identity confusion, notwithstanding his upper middle class, predominantly white school, and white band tastes. As such, this character expands the scope of “black authenticity.” He is unequivocally black because of family, tradition, and community rather than a set of specific symbols of blackness. And yet, the expected conflicts and anxieties rise as represented by Benji’s observation of his choice of raggedy old Converse sneakers in contrast to his brother’s fly kicks, and all of the Sag Harbor boys’ slightly inaccurate pantomimes of choreographed black handshakes.

For all Generation X readers, Sag Harbor will provide a deliciously indulgent romp with nostalgia for 80s culture-the television, film, music, clothes, language. Behind the hilarity, wit, and beauty of the writing, are a set of universal coming of age themes: familial strife, teenage angst about sexual intimacy, loneliness, and simple confusion. Nothing is resolved, and the insinuations about the disintegration of his parents’ marriage and his brother’s academic and emotional difficulties are not fully fleshed out. However, the effect of this lack of resolution upon the reader is not dissatisfaction. Rather , Whitehead uses it to capture the opaqueness of adult realities in the unsure mind of an adolescent.

Whitehead is without question one of the great writers of his generation. As in his previous works, he has a powerful descriptive voice, and a profound sensitivity to landscape and the sensibilities of a place. This book, however, reads as more tender and less cerebral than his others. But perhaps the most important constant in his writing, Sag Harbor included, is his remarkable ability to tell a history inside the story.

As Benji tells his own story, not only who he is, but from whence he comes, he pays homage to the earlier generations of black American strivers, who would hardly have been able to imagine a black family in the White House, but who dared to carve out a place in the sun and surf for their children.

Although the Benjis of today may seem to be less of a contradiction than those of the mid 80s, the contemporary bifurcation of Black American experience-on the one hand concentrated poverty and high rates of imprisonment, on the other increased presence in halls of power and influence-does mirror the 1980s, when the doors of Wall Street and the Democratic Party leadership opened for black elites while Reaganomics devastated working class Black communities.

The novel resonates with the present moment. Whitehead’s musical references capture the opposite poles of this moment: the hard hitting spareness of early hip hop, posited against McFadden and Whitehead’s ode to striving, Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now. What better text to go along with the remarkable and strange turns of our country today- at war and in recession, with a brilliant black man at its helm?

Sag Harbor is a novel for our age.

Imani Perry is a Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law- Camden, and the author of
Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004).