The Haps

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

I love that “fresh decade” feeling.

Trying to get work done. On you know, books.

My last apparition was this op ed about “post-raciality.”

And before that, I gave advice on what to write next.

The paperback of Sag Harbor is coming out in June, and I’ll be doing some dates around then, you can stalk me via the Events page and Twitter.

May Beezlebub be with you.

And we’re off

Fri, 1 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The book is out and has been given the treatment. As long as I’m in that narrow sweet spot between pre-publication anxiety and post-publication depression, I might as well update the site. So here we go with a lot of nice reviews -- thank you, burnt offerings to Beelzebub!

It makes the cover of the New York Times Book Review: “Whitehead’s delicious language and sarcastic, clever voice fit this teenager who’s slowly constructing himself...It’s an inner monologue, a collection of stories about a classic teenage summer where there’s some cool stuff and some tedium and Benji grows in minute ways he can’t yet see.”

Ron Charles in The Washington Post is really great: “Detailing the life of a dorky teenager in a community that's peculiar but oddly familiar, ‘Sag Harbor’ is a kind of black ‘Brighton Beach Memoirs,’ but it's spiced with the anxieties of being African American in a culture determined to dictate what that means...The novel's eight chapters are, in effect, masterful short stories, deceptively desultory as they riff on the essential quests of teenage boys: BB guns, nude beaches, beer and, above all, the elusive secret to fitting in.”

A profile in the New York Times by Charles McGrath contains the single best photograph ever taken of me. (It is not a closeup, obviously.)

In the daily New York Times Janet Maslin says that “When this book’s range encompasses kids, parents, community, tradition and history simultaneously, Mr. Whitehead’s recovered memories don’t seem so trivial after all.”

Adam Mansbach in the Boston Globe gets it: “It is Whitehead's most enjoyable book - warm and funny, carefully observed, and beautifully written, studded with small moments of pain and epiphany. It is sometimes possible to tell that a writer is enjoying himself, or that he isn't. Here, finally, Whitehead seems to be having the time of his life.” Thanks, man.

Radhika Jones in Time Magazine says: “Whitehead has tapped the most classic summer-novel activity of all: nostalgia. It doesn't matter if nothing much happens in Sag Harbor, if in all the boys' games with BB guns no one actually loses an eye. The pleasure is in the way Whitehead recalls it, in loving and lingering detail.”

In Newsday, Gene Seymour tells you to “Imagine a younger version of Bill Cosby, only more lyrical and far racier, with added literary and sociocultural references at his disposal and a greater familiarity with what the book terms "the insistent gray muck that was pop culture" as it seeped through the '80s.”

The Village Voice, my alma mater, does a brainscan on me, and it’s quite pleasant: “All of Whitehead's previous books were various degrees of funny, and Sag Harbor is funnier than all three combined...Sag Harbor's milieu will be recognizable to anyone who was half-sentient during Reagan's two endless terms.”

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Cheston Knapp says, “[J]ust as Benji is in the process of remaking himself, one gets the feeling after reading ‘Sag Harbor’ that Whitehead is taking his first artistic steps away from what has come to be expected from ‘Colson Whitehead.’ And it's safe to say, we're happy, and very lucky, to have both the who he was and the who he'll become out there, telling us like it is.”

The Cleveland Plain Dealer says “In Whitehead's effortlessly readable fourth novel, it's easy to like a boy who says, ‘Mishearing song lyrics . . . is the right of every human being.’”

The San Diego Union-Tribune calls it a “ebullient, supremely confident fourth novel...resembling a set of finely tuned short stories.”

Jane Ciabattari, author of an earlier article on the book, writes in the Barnes & Noble Review: “Sag Harbor is an infectiously entertaining novel. Will Whitehead continue in this new, lighter comic vein? I suspect not. With its glowing and affectionate portrait of a more innocent time, Sag Harbor has the feel of lightning in a bottle.” Eh, you never know.

The Rumpus does one of their “Original Combos” on the book. Thanks, Elliott Holt in the Rumpus.

Marie Mockett talks with me for the very excellent Maud Newton blog, and what happens is very nice.

The Sag Harbor Express and The East Hampton Star talk with me and add a little local perspective. Thanks, guy.

Update:

The Seattle Times says that the book is driven “by the author's dry, irrepressible wit.

The Miami Herald offers that “For a book about a boy's last great idyll before he becomes a man, it's sort of bleak.” Yeah, baby!

And from last week:

A fun interview with TimeOut New York: “Fans of Whitehead's deeply funny and imaginative novels The Intuitionist, John Henry Days and Apex Hides the Hurt—rife as they are with satirical wit and sterling prose—won't be disappointed. But here too is the personal touch of a writer looking back and finding the past still very much alive.”

And a nice Bloomberg write-up: “He can write sentences like nobody’s business, and the deepest satisfaction in this book full of them is his crafty turn of phrase.”

Well, isn’t that a fine howdy-do.

As ever, check out the Sag Harbor page for the latest info.

Check the Events page for tour info.

And check out my Twitter feed for excruciating minutiae.