We took back roads, arguing like real live grown-ups over the One True Route, murmuring the incantations. Right at Texaco, left at Scuttlehole, turn at the farm. There was a secret combination that unlocked the East End and we all thought we had it in our pocket. The power of pure lore. You truly live in a place when you don’t bother with chump stuff like street names, because the names of the streets are irrelevant. The Big Red Barn, the Burned-Out House, the second left, these were inarguable coordinates and all the map you needed.

— Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

Whitehead’s new novel is about summer, not as a season but as a landscape to be explored. Teenage Benji spends the summer of 1985 in the eponymous town on the east end of Long Island, living in a development created by a previous generation of African-American professionals like his parents. Benji sprends his days working the counter at the local ice cream shop, watching and rewatching the Road Warrior, scheming of ways to get into the local dance club, where “the DJ dropped Raspberry Beret to seismic effect”, and driving around with his friends as they test the waters of young adulthood and plan ways to spend the parent-free workweek, which Benji sees as a “vast continent for us to explore and conquer.”

This is a terrific book, drawn in large part from Whitehead’s own childhood summers out in Sag Harbor, filled with lots of humor in the exploits of Benji and his friends, as well as a very sensitively observed picture of the hurts and fault lines that lay between the members of Benji’s family, detailing even the particular nervousness he feels when he hears his father dropping ice in his glass.

If you’re looking for a good read to get you excited about the upcoming summer, and nostalgic for those gone by, this is it. It comes out at the end of April - I recommend that you grab yourself a copy as soon as you can. And special thanks to Open Windows for lending me her Advance Reading Copy!

Mishearing song lyrics, making your specific travesty of the words, is the right of every human being.

— Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

It’s a terrible thing to hate dessert, to remove yourself from the ways of civilized peoples.

— Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

Yes, the new handshakes were out, shaming me with their permutations and slippery routines. Slam, grip, flutter, snap. Or was it slam, flutter, grip, snap? I was all thumbs when it came to shakes. Devised in the underground soul laboratories of Harlem, pounded out in the blacker-than-thou sweatshops of the South Bronx, the new handshakes always had me faltering in embarrassment. Like this? No, you didn’t stick the landing: the judges give it a 4.6. (The judge from Hollis, Queens, was a notorious dick, undermining everyone from the other boroughs.)

— Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor

Rap was a natural resource, might as well pay for sunlight or the very breeze or an early-morning car alarm going off. No, I spent my money on music for moping. Perfect for drifting off on the divan with a damp towel on your forehead, a minor-chord soundtrack as you moaned into reflecting pools about your elaborate miserableness. The singers were faint, androgynous ghosts, dragging their too-heavy chains across the plains of misery, the gloomy moors of discontent, in search of relief. Let’s just put it out there: I liked the Smiths.

— Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor