Once, I had the opportunity to ask novelist Edwidge Danticat about her writing. “Whenever I read your stories, it feels like every sentence has a purpose,” I told her. “How do you do that? How do you make every sentence work?”
Danticat’s response, between giggles, was this: “You must think, Rochelle, that it comes out already birthed.”
Already birthed, meaning already figured out, powdered flesh and ten tiny toes already exquisitely formed. Meaning, that writing takes time, practice; that every writer goes through multiple drafts to figure out what it is she really wants to say and the best way to go about saying it…
I’ve been thinking a lot about writers and the deliberate choices they make. For a long time, I saw storytelling as intuitive, as something people understand or don’t. But now that I’m trying to do the Francine Prose thing and “read like a writer,” I want to understand why writers do certain things…
Which brings me to Colson Whitehead’s latest, Sag Harbor. It took me forever to read this book. (The more I like a book, the longer it takes me to read it. Keep in mind that when I worked at the literary agency, I read most novels in a couple of hours; it took me almost the entire summer to read Sag.) And, a couple of months after finishing it, Sag is one of those books that remains a mystery to me. Not too long ago, I told a friend that elements of Sag utterly enchant me: Benji’s hilarious obsession with Coca-Cola, the musical references that instantly draw me into a specific time and place.
But there are other things about the book that confuse me, that leave me wondering if they add to the book’s achievement or if they are, in fact, flaws. For one, there’s Whitehead’s style. His saturated prose, drips pop cultural references, dazzling images. I appreciate all those shiny, sexy sentences but can’t tell if they’re overkill or not. Sometimes I felt as though I were being told a story by a very cool friend, a friend much more together and knowledgeable than I’ll ever be. And because Benji is supposed to be such a nerd, the entire time I read, I felt a weird sense of inadequacy.
The other thing, the bigger thing, has to do with the novel’s structure. The part of the book I found most intriguing–the part of the book that made me question so much about the black family, my own life–had to do with Benji’s relationship with his father. So much of the book centers on Benji’s relationship with his friends, but when I finished the novel, all I wanted to know about was his family. His family is conveniently (too conveniently???) out of the picture for most of the summer. As readers, we get only glimpses of the tangled emotional abuse that’s the driving force behind how Benji sees himself. And because of what these complicated family relationships tell us about not only Benji but our own lives, I couldn’t help but want to understand them better…
I’ve always felt that black parents tend to be stricter with our children, to offer more structure, more spankings. And I know that part of this comes out of love–for so long, a black child’s misbehavior could mean death (Emmett Till), so we had to learn to control our children, by whatever means we could. But there’s this moment in Sag—when Benji’s watches the Cosby Show and sees the kindness and unabashed love that Cliff shows for his family and longs for a different kind of life— that Whitehead raises some of the greatest questions in “post-racial” America. As black folks become more accepted in larger society, as others recognize the extent of our humanity, will that be reflected in the way we treat ourselves and those closest to us? Will we learn new ways of showing tenderness to each other, of visibly showing compassion to those we love most?
These moments with Benji’s family are so complex and interesting, so real and true, that I forget Whitehead is writing fiction. But these moments are scattered in the book, hidden under other (and to me, lesser) stories. Still, maybe Whitehead is trying to make his readers ponder, maybe he wants to leave us confused, and like Benji, longing.
So what do you think? Does the brightness of Whitehead’s prose take you away from the story? Is Whitehead right to leave some things unexplored, or do you feel as though you need something more?
