Dag!

There are action-packed summer books — in which, say, a shark attacks on the Fourth of July or a well-tailored man with a mysterious past throws wild parties — and then there is Sag Harbor (Doubleday; 273 pages), the new autobiographical novel by Colson Whitehead. Not much happens in Sag Harbor. It’s 1985, and Benji, a 15-year-old New York City kid, takes off for his family’s beach house on Long Island, where for the first time he’ll look after himself and his brother while his parents are at work.

It’s not a distinctive premise, but Whitehead provides a distinctive heritage: Benji’s grandparents were among a group of professional African Americans who bought land in Sag, built homes and created a community. “According to the world,” says Benji, “we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses.” With this, Whitehead creates just enough tension for his coming-of-age novel. His teenage hero is both insider and outsider, working nonstop to find his place among the white kids he attends prep school with from September to June, the black kids he hangs out with in Sag and the expectations he’s beginning to have for himself as a black American. (See the 100 best novels of all time.)

It’s a lot of sand to cover, and Whitehead is determined not to miss a grain of it. At times his prose mimics the speed of the butterscotch Benji ladles out at his summer job scooping ice cream at Jonni Waffle. (“Is the toppings bar ready for its close-up? Let us cue the orchestra as we pan lovingly, lingeringly, over the delights in the tiny containers.”) But if the slow zoom sometimes verges on the picayune, it also highlights the eternal puzzle of summer pacing. Benji and his friends can’t wait to get out to Sag, but once they do, they’re desperate for ways to kill time — until the evening, until the weekend and ultimately until Labor Day. Summer is a self-consciously in-between state; summer coupled with adolescence doubly so. Whitehead stirs up a few deep currents — the escalating tension between Benji’s parents, notably — but for the most part, he adopts Benji’s strategy of never venturing too far into rough surf (“Sand beneath my feet, that was my rule”), content to float with his character on the surface.

That puts a lot of pressure on the prose, but Whitehead, whose writing earned him a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2002, makes the surface idiom-rich and plenty compelling. Benji is a Coke fiend (the drink, not the drug — he’s a good kid), and 1985 was the year of New Coke, an announcement that hit him hard. “It was as if someone had popped the top of the world,” he says, “and let all the air out.” The simile perfectly fits the crime.

If you were young in the mid-’80s, you’ll remember the trauma of that moment — if Coke could change, what couldn’t? And if you were Benji’s age, you’ll remember the party at the roller rink, the Apple II+, the Tears for Fears video and the way everybody said “dag,” a word expressive of such complex emotion that you couldn’t possibly articulate its meaning. But Whitehead can. “Dag was bitter acknowledgment of the brutish machinery of the world,” Benji explains, and he makes it sound so right and true that you wish people would start to say it again.

That’s when you realize Whitehead has tapped the most classic summer-novel activity of all: nostalgia. It doesn’t matter if nothing much happens in Sag Harbor, if in all the boys’ games with BB guns no one actually loses an eye. The pleasure is in the way Whitehead recalls it, in loving and lingering detail.

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