Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead is a coming-of-age story of sorts, though the main character, Benji Cooper, never really goes through any life-changing realizations or transformations in the course of the novel (unless you count the removal of his braces towards the end, which in my memory, is a momentous moment at fifteen, followed by the sad realization that nobody cares as much as you do, and the solace of being able to covertly swipe your tongue across gloriously pearly teeth).
The book follows Benji over one summer, as he travels with his younger brother and parents to an area of the Hamptons that has been claimed by the black middle-class as a summer vacation spot. Benji lusts after girls, works at an ice cream shop where he is the top waffle-cone maker, sneaks into a UTFO/Lisa Lisa concert and muses on everything from the trangressions of New Coke to Stouffer’s TV dinners. Benji is awkward (he makes the mistake of mentioning how cool “Fangoria” magazine is at school one day—and is ostracized for the rest of the year) and can’t quite seem to find his footing, even as he experiments with different ways of being in the world. Told as a series of vignettes, nothing really epic occurs in Sag Harbor–even when Benji gets shot in the eye with a bb gun, nothing much comes out of it, expect the realization that his parent’s are so checked-out that they don’t even notice the injury). What the novel does beautifully is capture that yearning to be something during those early years of high school, that yearning to be cool, when you are anything but. At the end of the novel, Benji hatches plans for his new look–based on the success of his older sister in transcending her bourgeois identity by going to cool clubs in the Village and listening Mission of Burma–and he plans on trading in his tennis shoes for combat boots. Of course, we know, with the wisdom that comes of age and disappointment, that combat boots won’t make Benji any cooler than he already isn’t, but it’s still fun to remember that feeling of hope as the new school year begins.
Beautiful, by YA author Amy Reed, in a way, takes up where Sag Harbor ends. Seventh-grader Cassie has just moved to a new school, having left “the island” where she’d spent her time trying to fit in with the smart, rich kids. She has already decided that things will be different, has traded in her tennish shoes for combat boots (and fishnets and band t-shirts) and on the first day of school, things are different. She is embraced by a “rougher” crowd, one that identifies her as “beautiful” and enticing, something she has never felt before. Within a few days, she is doing acid and running around the streets with her new tough friend Alex. Alex comes from an alcoholic home and her father has just committed suicide. One of the first things she does–after ragging on Cassie for still having stuffed animals–is burn the photo album filled with pictures of people that Cassie never really cared about–those girls she didn’t know well, but thought, until now, she wanted to be like. As the book progresses, Cassie falls farther down the rabbit hole, progressing from acid to a heavy-duty Ritalin addiction. Harrowing to the point of being painful, the book does not look away from the protagonists downward spiral, unlike the breezy, off-the cuff feel of Sag Harbor (which also touches on issues of abuse and alcoholism, but not as viscerally).
Reading Beautiful is a bit like staring down the barrel of a gun–you know something terrible is going to happen, you just don’t know when. As I read, I had to remind myself that Cassie was only thirteen–a child, still. As she dances with an older man on a party, high out of her mind on cocaine. As she has sex for the first time with a guy who claims to love her, but really just wants a pretty, silent girl by his side. As she struggles in the darkness of her own mind, without any anchor or tethering to pull her out.
Just as Sag Harbor digs into the dynamics between teenage boys, their secret hopes and dreams and neurosis–so does Beautiful capture the intense bonds and the tragic betrayals that mark female friendships during middle-school. In the end, Cassie is pulled out of the spiral, while Benji might never even enter it. But both books inhabit that space of that desperate yearning to be a swift chameleon during those daunting years of early teenhood.
