Coming of Age in Sag Harbor Amid Privilege and Paradox nytimes.com
SAG HARBOR, N.Y. — Colson Whitehead is a living example of why your mother warned you about fooling around with BB guns. He has a BB embedded perilously close to his left eye, a relic of a shooting contest not unlike the one he describes in his new novel, “Sag Harbor.”
“Sag Harbor,” which came out on Monday, is, strictly speaking, Mr. Whitehead’s fourth novel. It’s also a first novel that he has only just now got around to writing: an autobiographical, first-person, adolescent-coming-of-age story — exactly the kind of book he was determined not to write when he was getting started. That was in the early 1990s, he explained recently. Just out of Harvard, he was working at The Village Voice Literary Supplement, where one of his jobs was opening the mail. “I opened all these books,” he said, “and I became very aware of how many really boring first novels there were. I decided I didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing.”MORE
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