Why I'm having trouble reading Sag Harbor

The new Colson Whitehead, that is, which I have looked forward to for some time. I haven't posted much here about Whitehead, but perhaps that's because he's such a staple of my literary imagination--I feel a real kinship to this writer, aesthetically speaking, and we are the same age and gender, and have a similar taste for the wacky conceit. I don't know him personally, but I feel right at home in his nerdy, off-the-cuff prose--he's the writer I think of when I think of whom my contemporaries might be.

I've written here before about his first novel, and so have a lot of other people, so I won't get into it here. Suffice to say it's a minor classic, and I teach it at Cornell often. It is famously about an elevator inspector with identity issues. My favorite of his books, though, is John Henry Days, the tale of a press junketeer with identity issues, and I liked but didn't love his last novel, Apex Hides The Hurt, which is about an advertising executive with identity issues.

The new book is a quasi-autobiographical meander through the Sag Harbor of Whitehead's childhood. It is a detail-packed recreation of the mid-1980's, complete with knockoff Members Only jackets, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and bright white Fila sneakers, and let me say right off that I'm only 50 pages in, and I may not finish it. So this is not a review of the book. I guess what it is, is a review of Whitehead's apparent aim here--or rather, my discomfort with that aim, given how I feel about this writer. So yeah...this is a review of me, reading Whitehead.

I'm given to wonder if Whitehead worried that he was becoming a gimmick writer--that he trafficked a little too freely in the story of a black person reconsidering his/her identity against a backdrop of some not-quite-science-ficitonal alternate reality. Certainly Apex felt a little overly familiar. Maybe he felt as though it was time to write something real--a sentimental journey, about the creation of an imagination.

But the opening pages of Sag Harbor weren't doing it for me. The terrific prose is here, the instantly identifiable characters, the lavishly detailed setting. In a way, the Sag Harbor of the eighties is an alternate reality here, or it might as well be, for all the effort Whitehead is putting into making it real. And indeed, I feel very much in the book with him: it is his particular talent to be able to do this so skillfully, so thoroughly.

So what don't I like about it? Nothing really. Liking it isn't the problem. Reading this book is a little like hearing your brother tell some new friends a great story you've heard him tell before. You know all the details, you're delighted by your brother's ability to work his audience, and you feel a particular filial love for him as he does so. But you don't really need to hear it. You were there, and you've heard it all before.

Whitehead spends a lot of time (at least in the first 50) painstakingly recreating the objects, habits, and prejudices of the 80's, and I guess in the end this is what bothers me. Because he isn't inventing this world, he doesn't seem to know which details are important. And so we get paragraphs like this:

I'm talking frozen food here. Swanson, of course, was the standard, the elegant marriage of form and function. The four food groups[...]lay pristine in their separate foil compartments, which were in fact, presto, a serving dish[...]All hail Stouffer's! Pure royalty, their bright-orange packaging a beacon in refrigerator sections across the NY metro area. French Bread Pizzas--so continental!

And then we get Boil-In-Bag meals, Howard Johnson's fried clams, Chunky soup...and it's true, he gets it right on. I was there, man, pulling those french bread pizzas out of the toaster oven with him. But...I don't want to hear about my eighties. I want to hear about his eighties--an eighties I never saw before. He does that here, too--there is some good stuff about race on Long Island, the social heirarchy of the town, the street/suburb dichotomy, and it's a pleasure to read.

Ultimately, though, I think there's too much muck, too much window dressing, and because it's all real, he can't see that it isn't important. In his other novels, the conceit forces invention. It's not a crutch, it's a whip.

I do think this book will be a huge hit and will probably win a major award, which Whitehead will deserve, for being Whitehead. People are not usually awarded for their most brilliant inventions, but for the less inventive work that brought them a larger audience. This is that book for Whitehead, I think. But I, a hardcore Whiteheadian, will be waiting for the next one.

And yeah, yeah, I will finish this book. If it turns into something else along the way, I will update this post. Until then, though, have you read it? What do you think?

The Intuitionist

I've just finished rereading this novel, Colson Whitehead's 1999 debut, for the Weird Stories class. I liked it a lot when I first read it--Whitehead is one of my favorite contemporary writers, in fact--but this time I liked it more. It seems important, somehow. At the time it was published, it merely appeared to me like an inventive book in what I'd hoped would be a new era of literary invention. Now, though, it feels special. The intervening years have been disappointing in a lot of ways, and Whitehead's book increasingly seems like a highly improbably bullseye.

In case you aren't aware--the book is about Lila Mae Watson, the first black woman elevator inspector in an alternate-universe civil-rights-era New York that values elevator inspectors as much as, say, cops or firefighters. And in this universe, there are two schools of elevator inspection: the Empiricists, with their methodology of careful observation; and the Intuitionists, who are able to feel the elevator's pain. On the eve of an election--the Chief Inspector election--a prominent, brand-new elevator (just inspected by the previously infallible Lila Mae) goes into free-fall and crashes. This virtual impossibility stinks of sabotage, and Lila Mae is thrown into a mystery that involves politics, the mob, and the missing notebooks of James Fulton, the father of Intuition.

The book is a thriller of the DeLillian order, brainy and discursive, self-reflexive. (It's even printed in the DeLillo typeface.) But where it succeeds most spectacularly is as a new way of talking about race. Whitehead's protagonists are all reluctant to assume the mantle of racial identity (in his subsequent two novels, this burden actually renders then physically ill), and its attendant obligations; their concern is the invention of the self, and what the self means within the confines of the group. Through Lila Mae, Whitehead works through these contradictions, employing an elliptical narrative style that jumps halfway into each scene, then backtracks to the beginning to demonstrate how the present moment came to be. It's disorienting without being alienating, dark and funny, optimistic yet incredibly sad, and it offers a way forward from the doldrums of the post-civil-rights era. In fifty years, it will seem shocking that it was pre-Obama.

Also, the ending is great. Lila Mae discovers the particularity of Fulton's self-invention, and borrows it as a template for her own. All the book's mysteries are solved, but in a way that demonstrates the folly of clear answers. It's all very surprising, very deft, and very satisfying, without ever compromising its intellectual standards.

I feel as though each of Whitehead's books has been a little less good than the one before. Not a lot less good, just a little. Less...clear and whole, I guess. It's as though, with The Intuitionist, he stumbled upon a way to be great, and he is riding this wave of excellence and waiting for the next one to come take him away. I'm pretty confident one will arrive--he's a terrific writer. But this book is definitely going to last--it is getting better every year.