Word: benjie
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With a lopsided female lineup and a few tough losses early in the season for the men, a successful year was never a certainty for the nationally-contending Crimson. Yet with strong leadership from tri-captains Emily Cross, Kai Itameri-Kinter, and Benji Ungar, the Crimson worked its way up to finish fifth in the country for the Ivy League-champion women, and seventh for the men, who entered the tournament ranked 10th. Harvard ultimately sent nine individuals to the NCAA Tournament. “Our women were the stars this year,” Crimson coach Peter Brand said...
...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...
...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...
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...
...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...