.Colson Whitehead’s Boys’ World

Autobiographical new novel recaptures long-lost summers.

It was the era of roller discos and “Bette Davis Eyes,” an age when
much rested upon whether you liked Classic Oldies, New Coke, or
Dungeons & Dragons, as Colson Whitehead learned firsthand. After
winning numerous awards for his previous novels, The
Intuitionist
, John Henry Days, and Apex Hides the
Hurt
, Whitehead examines his own past in his new novel, Sag
Harbor,
which he will discuss at the Berkeley Public Library’s
Central Branch
(2090 Kittredge St., Berkeley) on Tuesday, May
19.

“The Seventies were probably worse,” Whitehead muses. “I’m not sure,
but I think the Eighties were a close second in terms of recent
horrible decades.” Back then, he chuckles, “if you wanted to see a
naked person, you had to stay up until 1 a.m. and watch Cinemax.”

Pondering sex, songs, slang, and shoes — his brother Reggie’s
“beloved kicks” are a “sheer gleaming white” pair of Filas
— the novel’s teenage narrator, Benji Cooper, recounts one
summer spent in the Long Island village where many middle-class African
Americans owned holiday homes. “A lot of people don’t know about the
black community in Sag Harbor,” Whitehead explains, “but there were
black professionals — doctors, lawyers, teachers in their
twenties and thirties — who wanted a place to go in the
summer. They weren’t particularly welcome” in the Hamptons, at the
Jersey Shore, “or basically anywhere, so they found this place and
started coming out. It spread by word of mouth.” Cousins, friends, and
co-workers told each other about Sag Harbor, and an enclave was
born.

As the novel begins, the Coopers are heading to Sag Harbor from the
city: “Driving with my father, it was potholes of double consciousness
the whole way,” Benji tells us. “There were only two things he would
listen to on the radio: Easy Listening and Afrocentric Talk Radio. …
And all those sounds seeped into my dreams. … Every time Karen
Carpenter opened her mouth it was like the lid of a sugar bowl tinkling
open and closed to expose deep dunes of whiteness.”

But parents seldom stayed long in Sag Harbor. “It sounds strange,”
Whitehead says, “but the parents would stay in the city Monday through
Friday, working, and only come out on weekends, leaving the boys to
themselves” in their summer homes. “Luckily, they were nerds,” he says
of he and his friends, “so they wouldn’t have a lot of shenanigans.
Looking back, it was a missed opportunity, but that’s the way it went
down. Not a lot happened.” That’s a funny thing to say about the milieu
of your new novel, but he’s keeping it real. “So there’s no dead body
they find, like in Stand By Me. There’s not a lynching or the
KKK chasing them through the Hamptons.” Summer vacation, the author
philosophizes, was ever thus: “a lot of tedium, a few insights.” 7 p.m.
(Donations to the Berkeley Public Library Foundation are suggested, but
not required.) BerkeleyPublicLibrary.org

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