Failed Expectations

Failed Expectations

Walter R. Jacobs

University of Minnesota

I liked [Sag Harbor], but did not love it or really like it as I do [Colson Whitehead’s] other books (especially The Intuitionist).

I can’t put my finger on exactly why. Per-haps it’s that the other books have either a slightly unreal aspect (e.g., Elevator Inspectors intuiting elevator functioning), or are larger than life (the subject of John Henry Days). Whatever the reason, it’s still worth a read, but I don’t think that this is the best work of Colson Whitehead.

The above is my July 2009 review of Colson White-head’s coming-of-age novel Sag Harbor (2009) on the social networking site Goodreads. The “Bad Books” project is helping me complete my thoughts. Sag Harbor is bad because it fails to live up to high expectations (The Intuitionist [2000] is on my Top 10 favorite books list). I’d now add that it’s bad because it’s hyphenated: many reviews (on Goodreads and elsewhere) note that Sag Harbor is “semi-autobio-graphical”; the “semi” should have been deleted!

As a privileged African American with experiences similar to those of the main character, a memoir would have really activated serious personal reflec-tion. Instead, in many places I found myself stuck on questions like “Did that happen to the real Colson?” and “This passage is definitely fake,” instead of “I’m reminded of the time when I…” or “I should have been….” So, in sum, Sag Harbor is a “bad book” because it fails to fully open multiple new worlds for me, as do Whitehead’s other efforts.