“We were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” Benji Cooper, the narrator of Colson Whitehead’s wonderful new novel, Sag Harbor, says. “A paradox to the outside, but it never occurred to us that there was anything strange about it. It was simply who we were. What you call paradox, I call myself.” Like his narrator, Whitehead spent his summers in Sag Harbor, a summer enclave of African-American urban professionals in the Hamptons. He condenses those summers in this autobiographical fourth novel, a splendidly evocative coming-of-age story set in 1985, when Benji is fifteen.

During the school year, Benji, one of the only black students in his Manhattan private school, occupies his time with Dungeons and Dragons and roller-skating bat mitzvahs.  Once school lets out, Benji escapes with his family to Sag Harbor, where the important question concerns who’s “out”, when and for how long. Once out, Benji must catch up on a year’s worth of new handshakes, new insults and slang, and the evolving rules of coolness.

The novel is not especially conflict or plot-driven, but there is a hint of darkness concerning Benji’s father. (His parents exist largely off-stage, only coming out on the weekends.) Instead, the novel is carried forward by Whitehead’s exquisite prose and extended and funny riffs on pop culture, touching on everything from frozen dinners and the travesty of New Coke to Benji’s hidden obsession with Lite-FM and his attempt to get into a Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam concert.  It works as a slice-of-life portrait of one summer spent negotiating the awkwardness of adolescence, when Benji secures his first job, at an ice cream parlor, and his first kiss.

Also recommended are Whitehead’s previous novels, The Intuitionist and Apex Hides the Hurt, which use the professions of elevator inspectors and nomenclature consultants to explore race relations and African-American identity.  Whitehead is also the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, John Henry Days.You can watch an interview of Colson Whitehead revisiting Sag Harbor here.