At Lit Hub she tagged five novels to read if you’re fascinated by the Black bourgeoisie. One entry on the list:
Colson Whitehead, Sag HarborRead about the other entries on the list.
As winter rolls over New York, I’m dreaming of beaches. What better time to revisit this earlier Whitehead novel? Sag Harbor places us in the rare air of the Hamptons, among a cadre of Black elites in the 1980s.
This is fundamentally a coming-of-age tale, freighted with more nostalgia for certain wonder years than social critique. But as Todd McEwen noted in The Guardian on its release, Whitehead uses his dorky hero, Ben, to map the “melancholy geography of class.”
Sag Harbor is among Benjamin Markovits's top ten stories of male friendship, Amanda Brainerd's eight books to take you back to the Eighties and Jeff Somers's top ten books to take you someplace you’ve likely never been.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
