Word: sags
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...crowds for a first-class nutter who might challenge him on "death panels," but he was constantly disappointed. In Colorado, he locked in on an angry-looking fellow in a teal T shirt - but the guy's fury was directed at the right-wing disinformation campaign. Obama seemed to sag. He had to bring up the "death panels" himself...
...debut novel - evoking a wonderfully textured world of streets and shantytowns - there is greater emotional heft in this new work. The tender relationship of the brothers before they are separated, and their sundering, is told in a timed-release fashion, reaching an unbearably moving climax. If there is a sag in the middle of the novel brought about by a too expository account of Indonesian politics, it is more than redeemed by the way Aw debunks every expectation one has of the postcolonial novel: questions of identity and belonging, of native and foreigner, of affiliations of birth and adoption. This...
...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...
...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...
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...