From The Washington Post:
No one writes with more acrobatic imagination and good humor about the complexities of race in America than Colson Whitehead. In “The Intuitionist” and “John Henry Days,” he evoked the nation's racial history as deftly as he created bizarre alternatives. And in his 2003 paean to his home town, “The Colossus of New York,” he captured the choreography of a vibrant, multicultural city. Now he surprises us again with a charming autobiographical novel that comes honey-glazed with nostalgia. Detailing the life of a dorky teenager in a community that's peculiar but oddly familiar, “Sag Harbor” is a kind of black “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” but it's spiced with the anxieties of being African American in a culture determined to dictate what that means.
Like Stephen Carter, Whitehead writes about an enclave of upper-middle-class blacks, in this case a contented but separate summer resort on Long Island. (Whenever the narrator mentions Sag Harbor to white people in New York, they say, “Oh, I didn't know black people went out there.”) Straddling parts of East Hampton and Southampton, Sag Harbor is an ancient town by American standards, a whaling community that predates the Revolution (it's mentioned in “Moby-Dick”). But the 20-acre section that Whitehead celebrates was settled in the 1930s and '40s by blacks from Harlem, Brooklyn and parts of New Jersey, professional people who “had fought to make a good life for themselves, vanquished the primitives and barbarians out to kill them, keep them out, string them up, and they wanted all the spoils of their struggle. A place to go in the summer with their families. To make something new.”
More here.