Feb. 8th, 2018 10:47 am
Apex Hides the Hurt, by Colson Whitehead
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lisa_goldsteinI’m on a roll here, so I went from The Intuitionist to another book by Colson Whitehead, Apex Hides the Hurt. It’s about a man who thinks up names for products, though interestingly enough we never learn his own name. (“Apex” is what he came up with for a type of Band-Aid.) He’s hired to resolve a dispute over the name of a small town, and finds himself caught up in a long-simmering feud among three factions. One consists of the descendants of the ex-slaves who founded the town and called it Freedom; another is represented by the last member of the family who brought industry to the town and re-named it after themselves, Winthrop; and the third is an entrepreneur with grandiose plans who wants to call it New Prospera. (One of the reasons the narrator is hired is because he’s black himself, and so it’s thought he could be fairer than most to the Freedom faction.)
As befits a book about names and words, the prose style is limber, pyrotechnic, often brilliant — and very, very funny. A conversation with a bartender:
“‘What kind of business do you do?’
‘Consulting.’
‘Con-sulting,’ the bartender repeated, as if his customer had added some new perversity to the catalog of known and dependable perversities.”
Here’s a library about to be turned into a clothing outlet: “He glanced up at the Latin phrase engraved above the Winthrop Library’s doorway. That was going to have to go, unless it was Latin for Try Our New Stirrup Pants.”
And: “Lily Peet-Esposito … was a connoisseur of jokes describing the cultural misunderstandings that arose when religious leaders of different faiths unexpectedly found themselves on life rafts and desert islands.”
And: “It was one of those buildings where there was one bank of elevators for one half of the building and another set of elevators for the other half. It was hard to escape the idea that the world of the elevators not taken was better, more glamorous, with butlers and canapés and such.” [Somewhere in the world a grad student is writing a thesis on “The Use of Elevators in the Fiction of Colson Whitehead.”]
The narrator is aloof, sardonic, someone who understands everyone’s problems but his own. (If there’s ever a movie made of this book — unlikely, since most of the fun is in its prose — the narrator should be played by Lakeith Stanfield, the cool, sophisticated black party-goer in Get Out. That’s how I imagined him, anyway.) His cluelessness gets tiring after a while — you want him to figure out, at least a little, where he’s going wrong in his life — but for the most part that doesn’t interfere with the enjoyment.
As befits a book about names and words, the prose style is limber, pyrotechnic, often brilliant — and very, very funny. A conversation with a bartender:
“‘What kind of business do you do?’
‘Consulting.’
‘Con-sulting,’ the bartender repeated, as if his customer had added some new perversity to the catalog of known and dependable perversities.”
Here’s a library about to be turned into a clothing outlet: “He glanced up at the Latin phrase engraved above the Winthrop Library’s doorway. That was going to have to go, unless it was Latin for Try Our New Stirrup Pants.”
And: “Lily Peet-Esposito … was a connoisseur of jokes describing the cultural misunderstandings that arose when religious leaders of different faiths unexpectedly found themselves on life rafts and desert islands.”
And: “It was one of those buildings where there was one bank of elevators for one half of the building and another set of elevators for the other half. It was hard to escape the idea that the world of the elevators not taken was better, more glamorous, with butlers and canapés and such.” [Somewhere in the world a grad student is writing a thesis on “The Use of Elevators in the Fiction of Colson Whitehead.”]
The narrator is aloof, sardonic, someone who understands everyone’s problems but his own. (If there’s ever a movie made of this book — unlikely, since most of the fun is in its prose — the narrator should be played by Lakeith Stanfield, the cool, sophisticated black party-goer in Get Out. That’s how I imagined him, anyway.) His cluelessness gets tiring after a while — you want him to figure out, at least a little, where he’s going wrong in his life — but for the most part that doesn’t interfere with the enjoyment.