Sag Harbor (Doubleday, 2009) by Colson Whitehead
Sag Harbor is a Hampton vacation enclave for mostly black New York City families, many of whom have had homes on the shore for generations. Benji and his brother head out to Sag early each May to wile away their summer hours, mostly unsupervised, living lazy days that hinge on a “paradox of black boys with beach houses.” The novel focuses on the summer of 1985, when Benji is 15 and gets his first job at Joni Waffle, has BB gun fights and GoKart races with his long-time Sag friends, drinks beer and gets his braces off. A coming-of-age novel veined with amusing anecdotes and 80’s iconography, nothing important actually happens in the novel – it’s like a Seinfeld episode – funny, but lacking point and drama (7/10).
Friday, September 25, 2009
Saturday, September 12, 2009
RollnSmoke Reviews: A GATE AT THE STAIRS
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (Knopf, 2009)
Lorrie Moore’s much-anticipated third novel features Tassie, a geeky, disconnected 20-year old from rural Wisconsin who, enrolled at a nearby college, lands a job as a nanny for a white family who is trying to adopt a black child, and a new world of “wordless racial experiences” thereby unfolds. The ensuing plot rides a strong undercurrent of local as well as national issues, tethered to a post-9/11 America wedged-in between wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. While Moore’s writing is still playful, some of her humor loses its subtlety, and the narrative isn’t jump-started until the last 1/3 of the book when a truckload of vicious backstory is finally unleashed, and a string of life traumas draws the story to a dreadful close. In the end the novel is not as spectacular as I hoped and ends hopeless, depressing and gray (8/10).
Lorrie Moore’s much-anticipated third novel features Tassie, a geeky, disconnected 20-year old from rural Wisconsin who, enrolled at a nearby college, lands a job as a nanny for a white family who is trying to adopt a black child, and a new world of “wordless racial experiences” thereby unfolds. The ensuing plot rides a strong undercurrent of local as well as national issues, tethered to a post-9/11 America wedged-in between wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. While Moore’s writing is still playful, some of her humor loses its subtlety, and the narrative isn’t jump-started until the last 1/3 of the book when a truckload of vicious backstory is finally unleashed, and a string of life traumas draws the story to a dreadful close. In the end the novel is not as spectacular as I hoped and ends hopeless, depressing and gray (8/10).