If you’ve spent days, not hours, lost in the quietly threatening worlds Whitehead creates in his unautobiographical novels, or years feeling their undertow, dragged down by protagonists whose foggy depression becomes its own gravity, then you push on through Sag Harbor in the hope of finding something to like, some sign of a novelist’s vitality, an indication that he has a story to tell, not just something to get out of his system or to keep things going while he comes up with an idea for a real novel. For however long it takes you to read almost three hundred pages, you are stuck with the family albums of someone you’ve just met. We hear about the Great Coca-Cola Robbery and When Dad Called Reggie Shithead for a Year, about the loser with a car and an ID (“It has been observed by wiser men than me that kids who hang out with kids who are too young for them often make themselves useful in the transportation and beer-buying sectors”), and about the UTFO show Benji and a friend talk their way into. With fifteen-year-old Benji, a smart kid with braces and a job at an ice-cream shop, as our narrator, we follow the adventures of a group of teenage boys running around an African-American enclave on Long Island (“According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses”) in the summer of 1985. That’s the tone: a certain archness, a touch of self-congratulation, a slipknot of a point of view (instead of following the road most taken, innovate: Follow me), and ironic capitalization.

“This country was built on innovation, after all, and just because things have been done a certain way for a long time, there’s no reason we have to keep doing them that way.”

“I recommend this approach to others,” Colson Whitehead goes on. “I’ve always been a bit of a plodder, which is why I now present my Autobiographical Fourth Novel, as opposed to the standard Autobiographical First Novel,” writes the author of The Intuitionist (1998), a coiled, dank existential mystery story about a war between two schools of elevator inspectors John Henry Days (2001), in which the steel-driver ballad rewrites itself and everyone it touches and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), a tense tale of a New York nomenclature consultant who is brought out to a small town to rename it and in the process retraces the founding and making of America. The “Message from the Author” on the advance reading copy of Sag Harbor catches the book’s tone right off the bat.

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead