Sarah Phillips

by Andrea Lee, Valerie Smith (Contributor)

This novel, in the words of its title character, is set in "the hermetic world of the old-fashioned black bourgeoisie--a group largely unknown to other Americans, which has carried on with cautious pomp for years in eastern cities and suburbs, using its considerable funds to attempt poignant imitations of high society, acting with genuine gallantry in the struggle for civil rights, and finally producing a generation of children educated in newly integrated schools and impatient to escape the outworn rituals of their parents."

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, African American, United States, France, Womens, Novels

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Andrea Lee received her bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard University.

Lee made her debut in 1981 with a journalistic reflection on life in the Soviet Union, Russian Journal. The book came after a 1978 exchange visit to Moscow State University with her husband when she was 25.

She is a former staff writer for The New Yorker, and her fiction and nonfiction writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. She lives with her husband and two children in Turin, Italy (2006).

Reviews

[Zanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the start of the chapter on her father's funeral, Sarah describes how the information of his stroke was hampered on its journey to her by the phone that was only 'half-working', and thus her mother's voice was 'embroidered with static', a situation that evokes the effects of a stroke on the body (as well as stereotypes of female anxiety and solicitude). Sarah elaborates to explain how a jealous Scandinavian boyfriend damaged her phone along with other comforts of her shared apartment, such as her chair (though she enjoys the sight of the 'new' broken wood in contrast with the old, worn finish, a subtle intimation of a fresh start, echoed, perhaps, by her mental equation of her father's imagined fall and the smooth, gentle motion he used to sweep his baptismal volunteers back into the waters) and the poster of a black male dancer in a Paris club, which hangs inverted, another suggestive image that speaks to her ambiguous relationship with ideas of blackness, perhaps even hinting at the future pattern of her own racialisation in France.

This level of care and subtlety is employed consistently in Andrea Lee's fictional memoir of a daughter of the black bourgeoisie of Philadelphia growing up in the '60s and '70s, so that every idea she offers is part of a constellation of sense data, memory and reflection delicately linked by a shifting sea of symbols and signs. As in her memoir Russian Journal, Lee writes with a feather-light descriptive touch, never straying far from the concrete, yet somehow evoking a world not only palpable and immediate, present in sight and taste, but richly emotional, with the rhythm and pitch of a ceremony.

Sarah is a low-key character and her voice is often so limpid and matter of fact that it can seem uninvolved, yet she describes sensations of thrilled terror and obscure relief vividly, and the equanimity and recklessness with which she steers her life reflect and comment on her thoughtfully acknowledged, but conditional and limited privilege, as well as the particular abrasions of her parents' mainly tender and easy discipline.

The book has an episodic structure that Lee rigorously works to make each chapter speak an individual strand of Sarah's truth. They have none of the triumphant moral simplicity of parable - rather they dispell pat conclusions about the intersections of race, class and gender that Sarah lives - but they are thematically distinct like colours on a palatte, or days of weather in different seasons, and bring clarity like morning light to the issues they touch.

For instance, in the chapter 'Gypsies' Sarah opens a reflection on her sheltered childhood world and dramatisation of an encounter that ushers the hard currencies of racialisation and the thrill of difference into her young imaginary with a characteristically casual yet suggestive scene-setting:

For as long as I could remember, the civil rights movement had been unrolling like a dim frieze behind the small pleasures and defeats of my childhood; it seemed dull, a necessary burden on my conscience, like good grades or hungry people in India

Developing the theme, the later chapter 'Marching' reflects on the sometimes fraught ambivalence around the involvement of the black middle class in the civil rights movement. While in some ways Sarah's parents' generational milieu is at the forefront of the struggle, yet in others they exist at a remove, having already achieved sufficient comforts to feel themselves embraced by the American Dream, and being racist and colorist themselves. The chapter ends with Sarah arguing with her older brother about the significance of a march, confessing "I didn't know what I really thought". This forced ambiguity about movement toward liberation seems to be a kind of racial violence in itself, part of the divide & conquer strategy of white supremacist capitalism

Together, the episodes of Sarah's memoir carry the elements of a symphony, progressing and gathering sophistication through their comments on each other as each takes up a melody heard earlier. The decision to place the chronologically latest chapter at the start is the crucial movement that strings the beads of the narrative together. Ostensibly the recollections are quite jumbled, but Lee has placed and fashioned them with such skill that the effect is tight and tidy as a perfectly-crafted oration.

Every book is ethnographic but some are so with a sensitive veracity that makes them precious, and this is one of those.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

This is a very well-written book, clear and evocative, and I particularly liked the early chapters, which evoke suburban childhood summers and follow the young protagonist through her first encounters with race. Sadly, the later part of the book didn’t jive as well for me, though the writing is equally good. The chapters are episodic to the point that it resembles a short story collection more than a novel (some of them appear to have been published independently), which I wasn’t expecting. It was also odd, given that this is presented as a semi-autobiographical work and people who meet the narrator identify her as black, to see a picture of the author – she looks vaguely southern European, perhaps Hispanic, and I struggled to reconcile that with a book about coming of age as an upper-middle-class African-American woman. (I realize that a portion of the author's heritage is African-American and she identifies as such, but that seems to me a vastly different experience from actually looking black.) At any rate, though it didn’t all quite come together for me in the way I expected, this is an elegantly-written and complex work with realistic, nuanced characters, certainly worth the relatively short time it takes to read.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

End-of-Year 'Loose Ends Bother Me' Microreview in Three Sentences or Less:

I was set to write a longer explicatory appreciation of this novel’s labyrinthine qualities, but fuck it: read Zanna’s (the number one review) for a perspicacity and formal brilliance I couldn’t fuck with were it lying dead in the road.

Told ya.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

In table of contents order, we have:

In France: 5/5
New African: 4/5
Mother: 4.5/5
G[*]psies: 3/5
Marching: 3.5/5
Servant Problems: 4.5/5
Matthew and Martha: 4/5
The Days of the Thunderbirds: 4.5/5
An Old Woman: 5/5
Negatives: 4/5
Fine Points: 3/5
A Funeral at New African: 4/5

I wish short story collections would stop putting their finest piece first. On the other hand, maybe I should be wishing that I stop expending more offered on the first course than the rest of the stories combined, thereby semi-cementing expectations in a manner far more suited to a novel or multivolume series than a form that will inevitably be a disparate whole rather than a whole in and of itself. Whatever the case, I liked the semi-Grand Tour the most, as much judgment of warp and weave and cohesiveness of beginning middle and end as for memories of Baldwin and Giovanni's Room. Although, 'An Old Woman' came close to matching it in terms of brutal truth complicated by present and past. One good way of wringing out the short form is to do away with beating around the bush, and in many admirable places, Andrea Lee did just that.

There's this New Yorker/East Coast/neo Euro dressing up as Americana and vice versa tone that a lot of writers apparently aspire to. Throw in race as more than just a stock photo and you get Dear White People done three decades previous that is less overt about not caring for the white gaze. You could slap 'politically incorrect' on some of these, but only if you know who created the term in the first place and can parse the difference between text that deconstructs a hegemony and text that reinforces. In my view, a good short story has some gristle showing, the remnant of being yanked out of some larger picture and plopped onto a table for purposes of dissection, so these pre and post adolescent musings that sanctify what is customarily passed off as glib and glances off the usual pedestals are quite alright with me. Irreverence is almost a necessary narrative component when the tradition you're inserting your writing into has a century or more disconnect between historical happenings and public consumption, else you'll end up revering the maxims such as people of color didn't exist before the 20th century and some of them not even before the 1960's, or thereabouts. That works if you're arguing people as created terminology (again, if you don't know who made it, find out so you can give credit where credit is due), not so much if you consider reality to be worthy of serious consideration.

Lee's got a nice turn of phrase, less of the quote dropping variety and more of the quality juxtaposition that makes you stop and ponder for a while without distancing you from the narrative at hand. It'd be wasted on the apolitical types who can't handle fiction that probes at the dregs spat out by the churnings of power, but for the rest of us, here's an elegant collection with a precise vocabulary and a good set of teeth.

[christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books i've ever read. A collection of short stories about Sarah Phillips- a Black woman who grew up in a well-to-do family. The stories are not in chronological order, which adds to the complexity of the main character. This book deals with race, class and privilege.

[phoebe · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's pretty rare that i find a book i can relate to on such a visceral level, and when in search of a good book i'm not necessarily eager to find something that feels like looking in the mirror. that being said, i did love this and now i understand why some readers crave whatever they think is "realistic" or "relatable." i particularly enjoyed the notes on race and class; lee is an expert in writing about the reality of being black in a white world and what it feels like to be the only one in a room. the only thing that would have made this more enjoyable for me was if i'd read it during high school, at a time when seeing representation in fiction would have probably had more of an impact on me. very excited to read more of her work!

[Janice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book; a story that I am very happy was told. This provides another perspective about an African-American woman's life. I would like to see a movie made based on this story.

[Annie · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a memoir told by a character whose defining trait is unresolved sentiments, the narration is crystal clear. It is not the typical, impassioned minority speaker whose bildungsroman reaches a cathartic vision or understanding of his or her identity. The narration deals with loss and being lost, minus the saturated descriptions either leaning toward a self-righteous message or an aimless series of self-deprecating humor. The conciseness of the text is astoundingly efficient in its delivery of minimum tangibility and maximum lasting impact.

[Ellen]

As recommended by Curtis Sittenfeld.

[Shereese Maynard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I re-read this story this weekend and it deserves a second look.

[Lynn Feinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful writing.

[Ari · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It occurred to me for the first time in my life that my mother, my brother, and I had each had a separate bond to my father, unfathomable to the others: now each of us had his own mysterious store of anger and grief" (108)

I really wish I remembered who recommended this book, I think I saw it mentioned a few times in this delightful thread https://twitter.com/SorayaMcDonald/st.... This novel is almost like a novella, similar to Maud Martha in that way along with consisting of a series of vignettes. Some of the vignettes are stronger than others. Sarah herself is a milquetoast narrator. She strikes me as one of the original unlikable Black female main characters, she's oblivious to oppression and selfish. She rejects her Blackness whether by refusing to get baptized or to acknowledge racism. She repeatedly turns a blind eye to both microaggressions and outright racist jokes made by so-called friends. I was annoyed by her but also found her fascinating. I don't think the author needed to have her suddenly become self aware but I do wish she'd been called out on her privilege, even if she chose to ignore that calling out. We get sentences such as "I was tall and lanky and light-skinned, quite pretty in a nervous sort of way. I came out of college equipped with an unfocused snobbery, vague literary aspirations and a lively appetite for white boys" but no introspection from Sarah on why she turned out that way. We the reader can hazard a guess but I remained somewhat unconvinced that Sarah being a member of the Black elite was the sole reason for her ignorance. This point could have been more salient if we saw Sarah interact more with other young Black women of her class but we don't beyond a chapter featuring a childhood best friend. It seems like an easy conclusion for a reader to make that the Black elite are oblivious and that may be the case but then I think this book needed to unpack that privilege better especially when it came to the parents and how they chose to raise their kids in lily white suburbia.

This book expertly depicts the many contradictions of the Black bourgeoise, raising their children to be the best and expect the best while not shying away from their Blackness. Their world is one that is superficial, the colorism is rampant and there is a heavy emphasis on fancy schools, camps and social groups. At the same time Sarah's father is active in the civil rights movement but that zeal is not passed down to his children. At one point Sarah's brother Matthew gets in a heated argument with his parents after bringing his white girlfriend to dinner, "You and Daddy spend all of your lives sending us to white schools and teaching us to live in a never-never land where people of all colors just get along swell, and then when the inevitable happens you start talking like a goddam Lester Maddox!" (64). It's an astute observation but there isn't much more time spent on that relationship or Matthew as a character, I wanted to see if the parents further interrogated their own beliefs and behaviors after that exchange. Or if that conversation ever reverberated in Sarah's mind as she proceeded to only date white boys. It is as though her parents are oblivious in their own way, of what it would mean to put their children in white schools, at one point Sarah nonchalantly mentions how uncomfortable her white classmates are by her presence and her mother grows visibly upset. It's almost laughable that she didn't anticipate the loneliness of being an only but it also seems like her parents grew up in Black neighborhoods so they genuinely might not have known or though to question what that would do to a child's psyche. There is some growth on Sarah's part that the reader is privy to early on, "His silly tale had done something far more drastic than wound me: it had somehow-perhaps in its unexpected extravagance-illuminated for me with blinding clarity the hopeless presumption of trying to discard my portion of America. The story of the mongrel Irishwoman and the gorilla jazzman had summed me up with weird accuracy, as an absurd political joke can sum up a regime, and I felt furious and betrayed by the intensity of nameless emotion it had called forth in me" (12), it's almost funny, Sarah is left reeling by the fact that she might feel HURT by a racist joke from her lover. She glides through that story almost as though she's above the 'ordinary' feelings of being hurt by racism but by the end of the story she's realizing she can't escape her Blackness or her past. Like many a Black expat who fled to Paris she feels called to return and that in and of itself is growth that the reader can't appreciate until reading the entire book. Her naïveté is very insightful even if the book only dips into the surface of the hypocrisy of the Black bourgeois.

SARAH PHILLIPS is a notable work of literary fiction for its focus on the children of the Black elite, materialism and in this particular instance, their ambivalence when it comes to denouncing oppression or questioning their privilege. There is no racial solidarity here but there are undercurrents of class solidarity. Sarah frequently interacts with people from all walks of life but to very little effect. Ultimately her lack of Black consciousness appears to be chalked up to childish rebellion against parental expectations which is unsatisfying, I think the author could have gone a lot further. That said the writing is candid and crisp, Lee is unflinching in her portrayal of the selfishness inherent in wealthy people, even those who are Black. She's able to convey so much with a few devastating bits of dialogue or cruel observations from children, such as one hilariously awful conversation with her school best friend, a character who embodies much of the benevolent racism that liberals often deploy. Sarah is unlikable which normally makes this a 3 star read for me but I'm trying to be less in my feelings about ratings and objectively speaking her churlishness and family background make her a fascinating character that we don't often see in literature today.

[Anhthu · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this! This novel reads more like a collection of essays following Sarah Phillips' life as the daughter of a pastor and civil rights activist, though the characters and stories are largely autobiographical. I liked the clear writing and voice describing many of the unresolved conflicts Sarah faces. My favorite chapters were the ones describing her time at Harvard (Negatives and Fine Points), with her intellectual and witty friendships, romantic pursuits, and musings about her future and her family's expectations.

[Akilah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am reading interlinked short story collections (short story cycles) as part of my sabbatical research.

I really liked the way this collection was set up. It starts with Sarah in France, basically wondering how she found herself in her current predicament (an expat in a relationship with a guy whose friends she sometimes sleep with and who is also a little bit racist) and thinking about going back home. Then, each story basically shows how she got there by with key moments from her past, starting in childhood when she decided not to get baptized even though her father is a pastor and then other moments from her life, either in her neighborhood or her schools. It's a fascinating character study that also paints a really clear portrait of a well-to-do Black family with ties to the Civil Rights Movement.

I keep trying to figure out how to end this, so I will just say I liked this very much. I like slice of life stories. I like how run of the mill the things that happen to Sarah are--as well as how they're impactful for being regular but also out of the ordinary. Sometimes books are about regular people and the regular things that happen to them, and this was a good reminder of that. How did Sarah become the woman in the first chapter/story? Well, these things happened that shaped her world view, and those are the things that make up the total of who she is, and sometimes it was just the things she observed about her family and the world around her and sometimes it was the way she behaved or responded to situations. What I also think is remarkable about the way this novel is constructed is that these things often happened to or around Sarah, but she still retained a lot of agency and felt like a participant in her own life even when it seemed like she was just observing. A masterclass, really.

[Ciana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. Readers are introduced to the aimless Sarah Phillips who is wondering around Europe, specifically France, with three men. All of which she has has some quasi friendship/relationship. After two chapters we learn she is considering coming back to the states. Then readers are transported to the past and follow her through her childhood, and all the way to college. The Sarah we meet in the past, has a life that is mapped out and determined. In these chapters Lee gives us a look into the Philadelphia's upper-middle class black community, and the expectations of their children. I suppose readers are to assume Sarah abandons the expectations of her life after college, but then the book just ends abruptly, leaving all loose ends untied.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely well written.

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. What an interesting glimpse into a world that white folks such as I didn't even know existed. Fascinating and heart-warming.

[Charles Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extravagant

What a wonderful piece of literature. The way she curated phrases is like a the first position ballet dancer of a decorated corp.

[Lisa McKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

As soon as I finished Andrea Lee's short story, "The Children," in a recent New Yorker, I wanted to read everything this author has given us. I started with a novel I didn't like so much, and skipped to this one, which is more a short story collection than a novel.
Lee appears to have an abiding interest in the question of the obligations of one generation to another.
The eponymous heroine of Andrea Lee embraces the freedom her parents worked for, preached for, marched for, by choosing to date outside of her race—an outcome neither parent endorses.
"...your mother and I are simply concerned about your happiness...You two are very young, and the world is not what we all would like it to be."
"And I suppose you'd like me to wait around till it improves! You're a fine advocate for civil rights—to set up segregated facilities in your own house!"
The characters and conflicts are all finely drawn. Sentence by sentence, this book is a pleasure to read.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars. I really like the idea of this book--a middle-class black girl graduates from Harvard in the 1970s and goes to Paris. That's how the book opens. What follows is a series of vignettes of her growing-up years, an almost obligatory one about her preacher father, one about her mother, one about her brother and his Jewish girlfriend, one about black cooks and janitors at the boarding school. It felt like the stories almost ceased to be about Sarah, and became only commentary. Of course each story illuminated how Sarah grew up and her worldview. But--I would have rather read about Sarah, the Harvard graduate, in Paris and beyond, with just enough references to her childhood, without it being the focus of the story, the past she can never leave behind and all that.

[Merricat Blackwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

The kind of book where it’s difficult to comment on style or technique because the style is just specific, precise evocations of what it really feels like to be alive in a human mind. Tight, compressed, novelistic in scope and cast but short-story-like in its observation of the hairpin turns of consciousness. I loved the structure, how Lee begins with the final revelation--“Before that afternoon, how wonderfully simple it had seemed to be ruthless, to cut off ties with the griefs, embarrassments, and constraints of a country, a family; what an awful joke it was to find, as I had found, that nothing could be dissolved or thrown away”--then winds backward into the constraints, the embarrassments, and especially the griefs.

[Barbara James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly enjoyable snapshot of late twentieth century American life in a novel that reads like a memoir by way of a number of short stories from the perspective of the protagonist, Sarah Phillips. She is a young woman who grew up as the daughter of a mid twentieth century black elite family who lived under segregation, the civil rights era of the 1960s, and integration in the 1970s.

[Ellen Chamberlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a boring and forgettable book of short stories that were loosely connected. I am shocked that it has so many good reviews. I had to read this for my advanced comp class and I was stuck with writing about it for 16 long weeks.

[Elsa Hendrix · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent.

[Fari Cannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5, stunning last chapter

[RaveAnt]

Maybe this is just neurodivergence but yeah I always used to be into like....not children's fiction written from kid pov... Not that I've read a lot of it but that's what I feel like I "get" the most and I especially feel that here with like the vignettes of Sarah as an 8 year old or 12 year old just...feel clearer...but also when she's older and stuff is more ambiguous and ambivalent and it's harder to glean her interiority as well....that's cool too.....being a kid is like being nd... You don't understand adult world and adult humour and tone or irony...

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andrea Lee is one of my favorite writers. We share a name, so I say that with prejudice. But she writes with elegance and thoughtfulness.

This is billed as a novel but it reads like connected short stories (Lee is truly a short story writer and even her most recent book Red Island House is a novel but with chapters that feel more like short stories). We start with Sarah as a young adult, but then each chapter after goes more chronologically starting when she's a child. Sarah is privileged but encounters slights, microaggressions and racism throughout her life and has trouble reconciling those instances with what she feels she deserves. And why not?

I couldn't say how much Sarah's life is based on Lee's, but where Sarah (and many of Lee's women) come off as slightly naive or even willfully ignorant, I always get the sense that Lee is looking after them and keeping score.

This was easily my favorite book of January and I'm always happy to return to Lee's writing.

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was short but felt long and was incredibly snotty. This is the 2nd book I've read by the author although this is the author's first book. I'm guessing this is mostly autobiographical and basically consists of short stories all coming of age about a young black woman growing up in the upper middle class Philadelphia suburbs, attending private schools and summer camps and the daughter of a baptist pastor. There were some funny moments and some really emotional ones. It wasn't a complete waste of time, but I'm glad to be moving on to something else.

[Loretta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderfully written book that is hard to put down, even though it is episodic in nature, essentially a collection of related short stories. I would like to know more about what happens to Sarah Phillips in later life and how she copes with it all.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was interesting; but ultimately, the author returns to the same images and tropes.