![]() ![]() He describes something as mundane as dealing with pesky insects this way: “The Horsefly Shuffle was the one dance I could do, no hassle: bat at thighs and calves, skitter a few feet in a serpentine style, repeat.” Whitehead’s humor is a blend of snarky adolescent sarcasm and adult retrospective knowingness. Whitehead could make an instruction manual pop off the page. The topic is the black middle class, which is not written about often enough and which is more timely and relevant than ever, as we move into a new Obama-era world of opportunity.īesides its intriguing topic-a black boy with a beach house-what sets this book apart is style. Sag Harbor is about race relations, as much as Whitehead’s celebrated The Intuitionist is. The Washington Post called the book “a kind of black Brighton Beach Memoirs,” but that makes it seem slighter than it is. I took it on its own terms: nostalgic rhapsodies on a slow-moving, lazy summer in the Hamptons. ![]() It is not a page-turner, but I didn’t expect it to be. Sag Harbor is a novel, but it is told as eight episodes and sometimes reads like a series of personal essays. ![]()
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