Book: Sag Harbor
Nov. 26th, 2010 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Colson Whitehead
Details: (c) Colson Whitehead 2009; Pub Harvill Secker 2009; ISBN 978-1-846-55254-0
Verdict: Sag Harbor has a strong voice but wanders into boring litfic ramblings about a teenage boy Attaining Manhood.
Reasons for reading it: I really enjoyed The Intuitionist by the same author.
How it came into my hands: Library.
Sag Harbor is rather more heavy-handed than The Intuitionist, in that it seems to be very much addressed to a white audience who need to be Educated about African-American culture. Since I do in fact need to be educated, I didn't mind this too much, and it still managed to be interesting and present characters I cared about. I particularly enjoyed the prose, it's lyrical without being pretentious, and there's some really memorable imagery. The problem is that what it's describing is rather a boring thing, an awkward teenage boy spending a summer with little parental supervision and discovering masturbation and eventually achieving his ambition of kissing a girl. It's a good example of the genre, because the characterization is so strong, you really get into Benji's head, but it's not a genre I really care for.
It's clever in that Benji is completely focused on his own struggles to be accepted by his teenage peers, but there are all kinds of subtle hints of what's going on in the background. The story of Sag Harbor showcases how his grandparents' generation struggled to create a context where their offspring would be accepted as middle class. The glimpses you get of the parents' generation are really poignant: they achieved their parents' dream of professional jobs and apartments in the nice part of New York and sending their kids to private schools, yet still aren't really accepted by the white-dominated professional world. Although Benji isn't very reflective about it, you still get a sense of how he and his friends are desperately trying to balance their parents' demands for them to fit in and be respectable, with an increasing pressure to claim a specifically Black identity, and whether that can be anything positive in the face of a lot of expectations about young Black men being violent and ignorant and thuggish. It's all stuff that's probably fairly obvious if you have any knowledge of US social history, but I'm pretty ignorant on the topic so I did learn a lot from reading SH. Obviously Benji's story is hardly universal, but it did ring true for me based on what I do know about minority communities attempting to assimilate and how that affects the inter-generational interactions.
The metaphor for this is Benji's nostalgia for his innocent childhood and his fears about growing up into the real world where things are complicated and often unpleasant. I like the fact that this is not only a metaphor, it's an emotional experience he actually has, which feels very believable. The trouble is that the story got a bit rambly in places. I very much enjoyed the first few chapters, but after a while it was just more of the same. I suppose it was doing a good job of recreating the experience of a long summer vacation where nothing really happens except inside an adolescent's head, but there was just too much of it to hold my interest. Certainly it's a subtle book, but not quite as impressively original as The Intuitionist.
BTW, can anybody recommend any good non-fiction about the relationship between the post-Civil Rights African American community and the established, upper middle class Jewish community? I've seen hints of it in other American literature, notably Alice Walker's later stuff because of course she was married to a white Jewish guy at some point, but SH has piqued my interest in the topic again, there's clearly something really interesting going on here.
Details: (c) Colson Whitehead 2009; Pub Harvill Secker 2009; ISBN 978-1-846-55254-0
Verdict: Sag Harbor has a strong voice but wanders into boring litfic ramblings about a teenage boy Attaining Manhood.
Reasons for reading it: I really enjoyed The Intuitionist by the same author.
How it came into my hands: Library.
Sag Harbor is rather more heavy-handed than The Intuitionist, in that it seems to be very much addressed to a white audience who need to be Educated about African-American culture. Since I do in fact need to be educated, I didn't mind this too much, and it still managed to be interesting and present characters I cared about. I particularly enjoyed the prose, it's lyrical without being pretentious, and there's some really memorable imagery. The problem is that what it's describing is rather a boring thing, an awkward teenage boy spending a summer with little parental supervision and discovering masturbation and eventually achieving his ambition of kissing a girl. It's a good example of the genre, because the characterization is so strong, you really get into Benji's head, but it's not a genre I really care for.
It's clever in that Benji is completely focused on his own struggles to be accepted by his teenage peers, but there are all kinds of subtle hints of what's going on in the background. The story of Sag Harbor showcases how his grandparents' generation struggled to create a context where their offspring would be accepted as middle class. The glimpses you get of the parents' generation are really poignant: they achieved their parents' dream of professional jobs and apartments in the nice part of New York and sending their kids to private schools, yet still aren't really accepted by the white-dominated professional world. Although Benji isn't very reflective about it, you still get a sense of how he and his friends are desperately trying to balance their parents' demands for them to fit in and be respectable, with an increasing pressure to claim a specifically Black identity, and whether that can be anything positive in the face of a lot of expectations about young Black men being violent and ignorant and thuggish. It's all stuff that's probably fairly obvious if you have any knowledge of US social history, but I'm pretty ignorant on the topic so I did learn a lot from reading SH. Obviously Benji's story is hardly universal, but it did ring true for me based on what I do know about minority communities attempting to assimilate and how that affects the inter-generational interactions.
The metaphor for this is Benji's nostalgia for his innocent childhood and his fears about growing up into the real world where things are complicated and often unpleasant. I like the fact that this is not only a metaphor, it's an emotional experience he actually has, which feels very believable. The trouble is that the story got a bit rambly in places. I very much enjoyed the first few chapters, but after a while it was just more of the same. I suppose it was doing a good job of recreating the experience of a long summer vacation where nothing really happens except inside an adolescent's head, but there was just too much of it to hold my interest. Certainly it's a subtle book, but not quite as impressively original as The Intuitionist.
BTW, can anybody recommend any good non-fiction about the relationship between the post-Civil Rights African American community and the established, upper middle class Jewish community? I've seen hints of it in other American literature, notably Alice Walker's later stuff because of course she was married to a white Jewish guy at some point, but SH has piqued my interest in the topic again, there's clearly something really interesting going on here.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-01 02:49 pm (UTC)There are a lot of books about Jewish involvement in the civil rights movement specifically, if you want that. I don't remember much of what I've read in that other than it all being awfully self-congratulatory, tbh. There are also a few good surveys out there of broader time periods. A very recent work of literary criticism is Sundquist's Strangers in the Land--I liked what I paged through, but I haven't read the whole thing, and it's cultural criticism anyway. I find that sort of thing illuminating, but some don't.
What I would probably most recommend is Jack Salzman and Cornel West's collection of essays from various historians called Struggles in the Promised Land. You might have to find it in a library, and it's from the mid-nineties, I think, so there might be more recent stuff out there that I don't know about. But most of it is about 20th century stuff, iirc, and so it could be a good place to start?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-12-01 06:19 pm (UTC)