Where were we the next summer? A few inches closer to it.” The struggle for Benji is the evolution of his identity: what does it mean to be Black in America in the 1980s. We had been doing this for years, making adjustments at the beginning of the summer, finetuning…Figuring out the next version of each other…We didn’t change all that much from year to year, we just became more ourselves. There is much to be learned from prodding the memories.Īt the beginning of summer, out on the beach, Benji says: But reading through, there is an arc, an evolution here. It feels as if nothing much happens as Benji goes through his days, hanging out with his summer Sag Harbor friends, getting his first job at Jonni Waffle, kissing a girl for the first time. I think that’s why it takes so long for the book to resonate. It’s a gentle prodding of a sleeping past. There’s an air of nostalgia and melancholy here, as if the narrator is trying to look at this snapshot and figure out the puzzle of how he and his friends got from there to adulthood. Though not obvious at first, it becomes clear that the narrator is the adult Benji, looking back. This is a story of incremental growth, not a leap.
No great revelation happens: he is the same kid at the end of the book as at the beginning, just three months older and with new experiences under his belt to help him on his way. It’s a chronicle of three months in the life of a teen who is trying to discover who he is, and how he fits into the world. It seems like a coming of age story, but it really isn’t. It tells the story of 15 year old Benji Cooper, and his 1985 summer in Sag Harbor, part of The Hamptons. However, sticking with it paid off and I’m glad I read it.
Sag Harbor took me longer to sink into it required persistence. Colson Whitehead’s fourth novel confounded me at first.
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