This is blasphemy, both cultural and literary, at its cruelest and most exhilarating, a poke in the eye to the English Romantics and American Transcendentalists whose cult of Nature was until recently America's true civil religion. Because 100 percent recyclable material, people really dug that these days." Every single thing in his vision was biodegradable. City, country: everywhere emptiness sat waiting in boxes, waiting to be opened. Its seeds will be deposited in spoor miles away and its market dominance will increase. In one brilliant set piece, his guy wanders into a swampy wood: "Fruit has splendid packaging. He also dispatches journalese with a drive-by, when his hero reads a newspaper profile of himself: "Did he really 'wink knowingly'?" The fun begins when corrupted language corrupts his hero's sensibility. Corporate-speak is an easy target, and Whitehead wastes little time on such sport. (I hope it's not giving away too much to add that his triumph doesn't cure him.) The parodically conventional mystery provides the novel's forward motion, but - and here's the paradox - what keeps you reading this critique of language is its language, and our perverse delight in the ingenious abuse of words. Let's just say it may be the one right name for this or any town - and that it was a wise precaution to have his contract stipulate that the citizens have to live with it for a year. Whitehead withholds his hero's choice until a couple of pages from the end of the novel. Not for the last time, he wondered what his clients believed they could achieve. "Tear the old signs down, put up new ones in their place - it didn't change the character of the place, did it? It didn't cover up history. so defiantly unimaginative as to approach a kind of moral weakness." On the other hand, since Whitehead's guy happens to be African-American, can he really bring himself to take a stand against Freedom? And on the other other hand, the whole dispute seems pointless. He reckoned it would look good on maps." "Winthrop"? Jeez, why not just call it WASPville? And "Freedom"? That's a brand name "from the B-GON days, an artifact of the most pained and witless nomenclature. A glamorous Old World cape draped over the bony shoulders of prosaic prosperity. the lilting a at the end like a rung up to wealth and affluence, take a step. He sees that "New Prospera" has "that romance-language armature. #Apex hides the hurt softwareShould it keep the name Winthrop, should it rename itself New Prospera (the alternative favored by the software tycoon who's moved his operation there) or should it revert to its original name, Freedom, bestowed by the former slaves who founded it after the Civil War?Īt first his choice seems obvious. His old firm tries to lure him back by sending him to adjudicate a dispute in a Midwestern town. When the novel begins, he's had a crisis of conscience, manifesting itself in a strange wound that helps lead him to a breakdown. #Apex hides the hurt skinThe apex of his achievement is to give the name Apex to a Band-Aid knockoff sold in a Benetton-ish variety of skin tones. If this paradox makes sense to you, then you're part of the target market for Colson Whitehead's parablelike third novel, "Apex Hides the Hurt." His protagonist, whom Whitehead leaves appropriately nameless, is a "nomenclature consultant" - his very job title is jargon - legendarily expert at naming commercial products. In his age, as in ours, wise fools sabotage words to get at the truth. (Like our own late-night jesters - David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert - Feste is ironic even about being an ironist.) He's not really the Lady Olivia's fool, he says: he's "her corrupter of words," and, like Shakespeare's still greater Fool in "King Lear," he uses corruption of language to purify meaning. Or truly does lament, under the pretense of pretense. Words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them." So Feste the jester laments in "Twelfth Night." Or pretends to lament. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!. "To see this age! A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit.
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