Benji is on a mission in Sag Harbor: to reshape his identity from a nerd who is an outsider at a “predominantly white” prep school during the year to a cool, sexy, hero. The boys are vacationing in Sag Harbor on Long Island, NY, an erstwhile whaling community that has become a vacationing site for successful New York and New Jersey African Americans. There are no more fervent or doomed searchers than teenagers, and Whitehead loops his larger commentary on identity, particularly the “paradoxical” identity of upper-middle class African American identity in the post-Jim Crow era, around two brothers: Benji and Reggie. Sag Harbor is a great, thought provoking read that is perfect for getting you excited to go spend a week or two on a bay or ocean beach.Īt the heart of this novel is the search for an “authentic identity,” one that has always resided within the self of community but has been overlooked or concealed from the searcher. A few days before I flew to spend the last days of July lounging on the beaches of North Carolina this summer, I picked up Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor.
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