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The acclaimed novelist and MacArthur Fellowship winner Colson Whitehead talks about his new book, Sag Harbor—and offers an intimate tour of the elite Hamptons community where it’s set.

Colson Whitehead’s fourth novel, Sag Harbor, reads like summertime in a book. Whitehead, 39, blunts his usual wild imagination and satiric edge (familiar to readers of The Intuitionist, John Henry Days and Apex Hides the Hurt) and goes all autobiographical on us. He evokes the season’s glories of the Hamptons of his adolescence, from the sweet anticipation of arrival at the beach house (leaving early to avoid traffic) to the letdown of that Labor Day party (it’s 1985, and the summer’s end anthem is “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”).

“When we were kids, we knew we’d biked too far from our territories when we saw a jockey on someone’s front lawn.”

Even those who know the Hamptons may be surprised by Whitehead’s portrait of Sag Harbor’s decades-old African-American resort colony of professionals—doctors, lawyers, teachers, CEOs. Azurest, where Whitehead (and his novel’s protagonist, Benji) spent summers in the 1980s, was founded in 1947, when Maude Terry arranged for the subdivision and sale of 20 acres on the east end of Sag Harbor. "In the days when I came out, we didn't envision these as year-round homes," Helen Logue Aubry, one of Azurest's founding residents, told the Sag Harbor Express when the community celebrated its 50th anniversary. "We came so our children could have a summer out of New York City. It was close enough for husbands to commute. This was really a community of women and children from Monday through Friday. Then on Friday the husbands came. We all knew each other from the city. If there was one mother on that beach, we knew that every child regardless of whose family it was was well taken care of. The women chatted, read and knitted. On Friday night it took on a different atmosphere."

Most novelists excavate their individual archeology right off; Whitehead hasn’t exposed his more realistic vein until after a decade of sophisticated postmodern risk-taking.

His first novel, The Intuitionist, out in 1998, seven years after he graduated from Harvard, was a genre-blender about the first female elevator inspector in a place not unlike New York City (he has said he started out to write a fake detective novel, and that Stephen King was an early inspiration). The Intuitionist won the QPB New Voices award and was a finalist for an Ernest Hemingway/PEN award (it also set him up for a Whiting award in 2000). Whitehead came back in 2001 with John Henry Days, an extended riff on the legendary steel-driving man yoked to a pop-culture set piece in which a twentysomething press junketeer visits a West Virginia burg where John Henry is being honored with a stamp and a festival. That novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle award. Whitehead’s MacArthur “genius grant” came the next year. His brief satiric 2006 novel, Apex Hides the Hurt, concerns a “nomenclature consultant" hired to rebrand a town (his claim to fame is concocting the name “Apex” for a Band-Aid competitor that comes in various skin shades).

What triggered the emergence of Whitehead’s autobiographical vein in his new novel? Fatherhood? Creative comfort? Surely it helped that Sag Harbor was written during a period when Whitehead had a newborn daughter and that MacArthur grant. “I got it in 2002,” he says. “It’s five years. In installments. It’s great, no strings attached. The way I took it was, ‘You’re a weird guy, we like your weirdness, so keep on doing it.’ That was my mandate. It really helped with this book. Having a newborn and working on this book, it allowed me to be around the house and take care of her. It allowed me to get this book where I wanted it to be before I sent it out.” Early starred reviews portend a hit when the book comes out in late April from Doubleday. (He talks about Sag Harbor here.)

We took a virtual tour of his Sag Harbor over a few winter days when the balmy weather made Memorial Day seem just over the horizon. He was at home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. (More on that here.) I was at my house on Lighthouse Lane in Sag Harbor, a couple of blocks from Richards Drive, where he sets the novel—or, as he put it, “So you’re just around the corner from where the shenanigans take place!”