There was one main thing about Sag Harbor that kept bothering me: why did Benji and Reggie's parents trust them to stay on their own all week? They're 14 and 15 years old -- just a little bit younger than I am -- and I doubt my parents would let me do that. The parents seem to put a lot of trust in their kids and I'm really not sure where it comes from.
Benji and Reggie seem to be, for the most part, good kids while they're in the city. There isn't any evidence that either of them get in any trouble. Still, it strikes me as unrealistic that parents would trust their kids to stay alone in a house for the work week, all summer long.
I expected the boys to get into much more trouble than they did. Besides drinking and shooting each other with BB guns, they honestly didn't do too many things. Nowadays, you hear a lot of stories about kids who throw huge, out of control parties when their parents go away for the weekend.
Benji mentioned that he wanted to go to a lot of parties in the city that year, so it surprised me that he didn't throw his own when he had the opportunity.
Besides the possibility of the kids throwing parties while the parents were gone, there are a whole host of other problems that could arise. The boys could get in a bad fight and, without parents to separate them, could get hurt. In fact, Benji does get hurt, when he's shot with the BB gun. The lack of parental supervision in Sag Harbor was really the only thing about the book that struck me as being wrong. Besides that, I really liked it, and I thought it was a great way to end the semester.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting here. Are you saying that Whitehead is exaggerating or distorting the way his parents (and the others in the community) gave the kids this kind of freedom, that this depiction is "unrealistic" in that sense? Or are you saying that you don't approve of their policy? Benji and Reggie seem to deal with a feast-or-famine kind of supervision: either they're ignored, or their father is all over their case. They seem to prefer the latter.
ReplyDeleteWe talked about this a bit in the other section, but my friends and I (same generation as Benji) were left to our own devices far more often than seems common now. Partly this may have been that we were the first generation where both parents working was more common, but the massive structures of supervised activities for kids hadn't yet kicked in. (We didn't go to camp, or to the various kinds of edifying activities kids do during the summer to pad their college apps. We were mostly left alone to wander all over town and get into all manner of mischief.) The depiction of teenage life in Sag seems totally familiar to me, even though my folks stayed in my beach town, because it was the only house we had.