Sag Harbor and the television
The TV features heavily in Sag Harbor. As early as page 7, Ben tells us that “[t]he TV was our babysitter…” In fact, throughout the book, the television is treated as an essential fixture of their household- not even of their house, as the television and its role follows them to Sag Harbor- it’s very nearly a fifth member of their family. Its absence is explicitly and notably disturbing (page 121, “[t]he TV was off, a bad sign.”), for, as Ben tells us on page 156, “The TV was always on in our house, whether people watched it or not. We needed sound, any kind of sound. Watching TV and reading at the same time was standard op.” These repeated references to the TV are outgrowths of a core theme in Sag Harbor: that of the “made-for-TV” or “Cosby” family. The argument Ben makes with these lines is that his family is fundamentally structured around a veneer of correctness. How the household actually functions (quite poorly and abusively, from what we can see) is entirely irrelevant