Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead. New York: Anchor Books, 2009.  Review by Sharon Harrigan

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Sag Harbor is a novel, but it is told as eight episodes and sometimes reads like a series of personal essays. It is not a page-turner, but I didn’t expect it to be. I took it on its own terms: nostalgic rhapsodies on a slow-moving, lazy summer in the Hamptons.

The Washington Post called the book “a kind of black Brighton Beach Memoirs,” but that makes it seem slighter than it is. Sag Harbor is about race relations, as much as Whitehead’s celebrated The Intuitionist is. 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.

Besides its intriguing topic—a black boy with a beach house—what sets this book apart is style. Whitehead could make an instruction manual pop off the page. Whitehead’s humor is a blend of snarky adolescent sarcasm and adult retrospective knowingness. 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.”

Sometimes the humor is as subtle as adolescent word choice, such as: “There were fewer boats then to zit the surface of the bay.” The humor also comes from mixing street language with artful words or from stand-up comic schtick: “Paging Doc Puberty, arms scrubbed, smocked to the hilt, smacking the nurses on the ass, and well-versed in all the latest techniques.”

Some of the humor is sharp analogies (“Like a knife and fork, he appeared around dinnertime”) and understatement (“Good looking girlfriends, from all accounts, with all their teeth and everything.”) On every page of this 329-page book are examples I could pluck. The chapter titles are also hilarious, including: “Notions of Roller-Rink Infinity,” “The Heyday of Dag,” and “If I Could Pay You Less, I Would.” It is a witty, witty book.

Part of what makes Whitehead’s tone jump off the page is his promiscuous switching from first person singular, to first person plural, to second person. These switches give the book the restless, immediate tone of speech.

It would probably come to no surprise to any reader that Whitehead used to be a television critic for The Village Voice. His fluency with pop culture references in the 1980s is encyclopedic. His protagonist, Benji, rhapsodizes for pages about Campbell’s Homestyle Chicken Soup with Egg Noodles (“the Cadillac of soups”), Swanson frozen food (“meal and plate in one slim rectangle—this was American ingenuity at its best and most sustaining”), ice cream toppings (“let us cue the orchestra as we pan lovingly, lingeringly, over the delights in the tiny containers”), the magical qualities of Fila sneakers, and Run DMC versus Ice Cube. “The Cosby Show” versus “Good Times.”  Although Benji’s parents are Ivy-educated and the kids go to fancy Upper East Side prep schools, their TV habits mimic those of the working class people I grew up with.

Being a fly on the wall in such a racially charged environment is fascinating. On the divide between the black and white Hamptons, we get: “Even the animals changed, so extreme the border between Sag Harbor and East Hampton.” The social stratum within the black culture is interesting, too: “We had die-hard bourgies, we had first-generation college strivers, fake WASPs, the odd mellowing Militant.”

Benji and his family, as black people trying to assimilate in a white culture, feel like they are always on display, that they have to be extra cautious not to break any rules or be judged by any stereotype. “You  didn’t, for example, walk down Main Street with a watermelon under your arm,” Benji says. His parents are lenient by this generation’s helicopter-parenting standards (the 14- and 15-year-old boys are left unsupervised through the week, and the parents come to the beach house only on weekends, and the inevitable sink full of maggoty dishes and diet of day-long ice cream ensue), but Benji is grounded for a week for going to school with wrinkled khaki-uniform pants and his brother Reggie earns the nickname Shithead for a whole year when he gets a C minus on his report card. These are crimes of class, which their father will not tolerate.

Benji’s mother, who is a corporate lawyer, comes from a middle class family, and she inherits the beach house from her parents. His father, who is a doctor, is a self-made man and makes his children aware of how tenuous their recent status is.

The book is not only gorgeous and funny, it is poignant. At the beginning, I was waiting for Whitehead to go deeper into the dark places of family myth and secrets, and ultimately, he does. More than half-way through the book, we start to get the parents as characters. It’s the father who provides the threat of violence, which makes the book weightier than a Brighton Beach Memoir. The chapter “To Prevent Flare-Ups”—cleverly referring both to the father’s obsession with grilling and uncontrollable temper—starts “We were a Cosby family, good on paper. . . Did we squirm? Oh so quietly.”

The rest of the chapter reveals the sentence’s corollary: they were not how they appeared. There is a hint at the violence in Benji’s parents’ relationship when he accidentally finds a note his mother wrote cataloging his father’s offenses, such as yelling at her in front of her friends and drinking too much every day. Then we witness his father publicly humiliating his mother while she is chatting with her girlfriends, making her abruptly leave and go to the store to fix her mistake of buying the wrong kind of disposable plates. The conclusion of that scene is one of the darkest and most moving passages of the book.

Another emotional scene–the excerpted in The New Yorker before the book was published–comes at the end of the chapter about the BB gun fight in which no one really gets hurt. “I’d like to say, all these years later, now that one of us is dead and another paralyzed from the waist down from actual bullets—drug-related, as the papers put it—that the game wasn’t so innocent after all.” He goes on to make a larger point about weapons: “As time went on, we learned to arm ourselves in our different ways. Some of us with real guns, some of us with more ephemeral weapons, an idea or improbable plan.” This is a technique Whitehead does so efficiently and lightly—taking an object or a piece of a story and letting it expand into something abstract and thought-provoking.

Whitehead chose to put this book in the past tense and frame it with the perspective of an adult looking back. The adult perspective gives the book more depth and allows for some epiphanies arrived at after decades, since the teenage Benji doesn’t change much in the course of the novel. So little change occurs that the narrator feels the need to catalog it on the last page.

Someday I hope to read a perfect Whitehead book, melding both his usual breathtaking style with the addition of a page-turning plot. For now, though, it is enough to appreciate the joy ride and virtuosity of his tone, rhythm, humor, playfulness, musicality (rap and jazz come to mind), and wit.
In sum, What I Learned from the summer at Sag Harbor:

1. Read those jazzy, long-winded, rule-breaking, profane and delicious sentences over and over again to get their groove into my head so I can give myself license to also let it rip.

2. Experiment with the surprise of street language and serious-sounding (even stuffy) literary language in the same sentence.

3. It’s OK, if you’re writing in a colloquial first person, to shift to plural, second, and imperative once in a while.

4. Vary sentence length—think solos then background rhythm.

5. Start out with a premise that has a twist. But beware of gimmicks.

6. Don’t be afraid to have a sometime villain and some deep family drama, especially if it’s interspersed with humor.

7. If you’ve already won a MacArthur Fellowship and a Whiting Writers’ Award, you can afford to bypass the traditional plot arc of big transformation required of a coming of age novel. If you’re not, you better stick to it.

The Shell Collector by Anthony Doerr. New York: Penguin, 2003. Review by Sharon Harrigan

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The Shell Collector is a thematically and stylistically coherent collection of short stories about the blur between reality and magic, degradation of the environment caused by humans, the impossibility of living fully in the man-made world, the ravages of war and the trauma it causes to individuals, and the suffering caused by cutting oneself off from other humans. Most of the stories are long and complicated in structure, going back and forth in time, often with twenty-year increments, sometimes forming chronological figure eights.

What struck me as original and daring in these stories is Doerr’s courage to take on big topics. His characters are on a heroic quest, and the language and stakes and suspension of disbelief have mythic, archetypical, or fairy tale qualities. One way he achieves this effect is to use mostly labels instead of names. For example, the protagonist of the title story is known on as “the shell collector,” and in the second story the characters are “the hunter” and “the hunter’s wife.”

Nature is a dangerous place in the title story. Scorpions lay in wait in people’s shoes; a poisonous tentacle, dried and on the shore for eight days, stings a boy and swells his legs; and the geography snail, smaller than a pinkie, can paralyze and drown a human.

This fictional world is full of spirals and shells. The shell collector’s blindness is like a shell, according to the Muslim imam. Nancy, an American woman visiting Africa on a quest for self-fulfillment, is trying to hide from her family and responsibilities, to put herself in a shell. Life is like a snail shell: “spiraling upward from the inside, whorling around its inhabitant, all the while being worn down by the weathers of the sea.” The end of life is “diving into its reverse spiral by now, into that dark, whorling aperture.” The story structure itself is like a snail shell, going back and forth in time, opening up smaller and larger spaces.

The stories boldly tackle old-fashioned morality. The shell collector describes his wife and son as do-gooders and goody-goodies—terms of contempt. At the end, the poison cone shell changes the shell collector’s moral compass, cures him of his turpitude, the way it did for Nancy, the American woman who had abandoned her children then decided to return to them after being stung.

Towards the end of the story, the shell collector starts to collect a cone snail with the intention of poisoning and possibly killing the reporters who have come to tell his story, but decides not to, after he has been stung but doesn’t know it yet. “He would not poison them,” we are told. “It felt wonderful to make a decision like that. He wished he had more shells to hurl back into the sea, more poisons to rid himself of.” But it’s too late; he gets this epiphany only after his body starts to become paralyzed. At the end, he is almost immobile like the cone shell. He has changed from bad to good, but too late. The tragic fairy tale quality of this story is as big as life and death and gorgeously executed: “He remembered this: blue. He dreamed of the ocean. Time passed, he couldn’t tell them how much.”

“The Hunter’s Wife,” the second story, stretches past physical possibility into the realm of magical dreams. The title character learns to see animals’ and humans’ dreams just by touching then and even to see where they go after they die. Like the shell collector, the hunter does not believe in anything beyond what can be explained scientifically. The shell collector doesn’t believe that the snail’s poison can cure moral ills as well as physical ones. The hunter doesn’t believe that the hunter’s wife can really see the dreams of dead animals and people; he thinks she’s exploiting mourners for their money. She convinces him at the end of her magic, but he wonders is she is hypnotizing him, then decides it doesn’t matter.

“For a Long Time, This Was Griselda’s Story” is as jocular and playful as its title. We know we are going to go on a wild ride, especially because of the use of first person plural narrator. The story opens with a wide-scope lens: “In 1979 Griselda Drown was a senior volleyballer at Boise High, a terrifically tall girl with trunky thighs, slender arms and a volleyball serve that won an Idaho State Championship despite T-shirts claiming it was a team effort.” Then the narrator becomes the voice of the town: “There were rumors; whether they were true or not didn’t matter. We all knew them. They might as well have been true.”

Female sexuality and society’s insistence on squelching it confronts us at the very beginning of the story: “She [Griselda] was a gray-eyed growth spurt, orange haired, an early bloomer, and there were rumors about how she took boys two at a time in the dusty band closet where the dented tubas and ruptured drums were kept, about how she straddled the physics teacher, about her escapades during study hall with ice cubes.”

Her sister Rosemary’s story is a cautionary tale about what happens when female sexuality is suppressed. The story describes her relationship with her husband, Duck: “Occasionally, they grappled together at awkward sex. It never took.”

This story is unusual in the collection because the characters have individual names, and the names are a bit whimsical, like the whole story. The name Griselda reminds us of a character from the Decameron and Canterbury Tales, giving it a bawdy overtone. Rosemary, the sister’s name, reminds us that she is only about as alive as a plant, one that does not sexually reproduce. Mrs. Drown, their mother, kills herself with paranoia and worry, like her name suggests. Duck Winters, Rosemary’s husband, is as ridiculous, cold, and barren as his name.

The story comes full circle at the end, decades later. It starts in high school, with the description of Griselda playing on the volleyball team and ends at the high school, where she stops on her world-wide tour to give a spectacular performance, dressed like a an armored Viking diva on stage, assisting a carnival performer who eats metal, whole cars and airplanes, before everyone’s adoring eyes.

By tackling good and bad, life and death, magic and skepticism, these stories take enormous and admirable risks. I can imagine these stories being workshopped and hearing people say they are too unrealistic.

Are the stories plausible? It doesn’t matter. I was immersed in their complete alternate universes of lethal snails and dreams from the dead and metal-eating goddesses. I am usually a skeptic, but these magical stories completely won me over.