Sag Harbor

Sag Harbor (2010) by Colson Whitehead

Genre: Male coming of age story that goes right at Cather in the Rye's crown

Recommended For: Someone who is capable of getting emotionally excited and anxious and invested over a book that doesn’t tease you with a big picture adversary to overcome or climax to anticipate.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

If you take all of the kids who get suspended from high school in a given year, I imagine less than 2% of them get in trouble because they strictly have intentions to do a thing that is against the rules and then get caught doing that thing. More likely, they just fall into one of two categories:

Trying to stand out is theoretically a good thing or, if regularly being reflected through rule breaking, is quite possibly the result of not getting enough attention at home or otherwise. You rock the boat until the other passengers treat you like you exist.

When I got suspended my sophomore year I was in the second category, which I assume to be a larger category. The crime was drinking on campus during a football game. I went with some other fellas who were drinking and driving around campus and proceeded to park on the wrong side of the street and someone (to this day, no one has copped to it) threw an empty can out of the window, leading to our big trouble.

I didn’t really choose to drink, at least in my mind at the time. I was at the football game and some friends said they were doing that thing. It might seem like I got in trouble for actively breaking a rule (drinking underage on my school’s campus in a car), but opting out of that plan seemed entirely more active a choice than what I did, which was passive. I just told you, “at least in my mind at the time,” but even now, thinking back, I’d be lying if I said that when faced with that binary decision, even though the memory isn’t so visceral that I can recall my thoughts, I do consider doing what I did to be simple psychological inertia.

*I should note that this was not my first time drinking and I would continue to drink throughout high school, so I was not the one-time victim of peer pressure.

—

I don’t really know if you get to call it inertia if you know ahead of time that you’ll fall victim to it.

That feeling isn’t specifically what Sag Harbor is about, but it’s encompassed and portrayed all throughout its pages. By the time I get through a Colson Whitehead novel, I tend to boldly suggest to myself that it is the best of the genre it is fitting itself into. I’m not sure the world needed another male coming of age story - I don’t think I would have picked this book up if it were described to me this way, but it’s the best version of that kind of novel I’ve read in years, not just because of how well it encapsulates all the those feelings, but because of the layers of social and racial text he weaves into it.

What sits at it all, though, is a kid with a lot of time to kill. Things are changing because things change every year at that age and fitting in means keeping up. It means going with the flow over and over again (even if you don’t love it) and occasionally contributing some sort of organizing factor of your own so can have said to have played your part and keeping that cycle going, hoping that feeling of unease magically turns into community. There are some who are more active orchestrators, but most just participate in this cycle.

And perhaps there are some who actually did find community at this fraught age. Or there are the ones who did not conform to inertia and had even worse experiences. But I think most fell into this cycle. I felt like I saw it more clearly reading Sag Harbor, even though, again, it isn’t strictly about that. Even though it reflets something so entirely different than my own experiences. I still saw my experiences with calm while reading it. I don’t live with too much regret for living and thinking and feeling that way, mostly because you can live that way at any age, and I know that I know longer do.

—

There’s plenty of stuff I enjoy, but watching basketball is special to me. The more obsessed I got with watching the NBA, the more I could justify it more than “going out” which at a certain point in high school was giving me anxiety (for not having fun, for social anxiety, for getting into trouble, for reasons I couldn’t really understand). I used to want to make sure I “went out” on a Friday night because, it would check the box of having something to discuss Monday at school and give me Saturday to do nothing. But when there was a big enough NBA game on, I might give myself permission to stay home and watch. The cycle I had developed had gotten in the way of many capital “I” Interests despite a couple lower case ‘i’ interests, and eventually I was comfortable calling the NBA an Interest given the amount of time invested. And staying in, chatting about the game with my parents, one or both of whom might watch a little bit of it with me, felt like a personal freedom.

I know that sounds like the opposite of how you usually see freedom written down. Inside the home.

—

The moments when the father looms in Sag Harbor are harrowing. The moments when girls are maybe, possibly going to become a factor are relatable. And the moments when time is being passed, which is a good portion of the book, it feels like you are doing just that, passing time with your book. Enjoying yourself, thinking about what comes next.

The least confident times in our lives snap such clear memories. Because everything is so intense. Because any moments of confidence feel so earned. Because the trouble - as psychologically and practically fraught as it may be - does tend to make for a good story. Sag Harbor doesn’t read like trauma at all. It reads like unsure footing. I’d be surprised if you didn’t understand.

3 More Things You Can Read Today:

-Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis

-Gavin Newsom Has Nothing To Offer

-How Do You Write About the Inexplicable?