Colson Whitehead has always threaded his novels with a thin cord of genre to pull the plots along: The Intuitionist is an alternate-earth detective story and John Henry Days follows the outline of a thriller. Sag Harbor, then, is his first out-and-out "literary" novel: Nothing really happens, unless you consider a thinly veiled memoir about a privileged African-American teenager named Benji spending the summer of 1985 in the Hamptons to be a plot. With no obligation to hit the requisite plot points, Whitehead is left, for the first time, to stand or fall purely on the basis of his writing talent.

Instead, he flies. Everything from a part-time summer job at a gourmet-ice-cream parlor ("What the hell was a praline, and what would possess someone to insert it into a creature called Cran-Mocha?") to Benji's attempts to be known as Ben ("Benji was the name of a handholder, not a fingerfucker or an avid squeezer of breasts...") glows. The book feels innocuous but still important, the way everything does to a teenage boy: A BB gun feels heavy, "dense with cause and effect."

The lazy subject matter makes this the perfect summer novel: It's a book to read in a bright shaft of light, preferably outdoors so you can look away from the bright pages and see the whole happy world at play. Things always look more interesting through Whitehead's eyes.