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48. Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead
Like The Intuitionist, it's full of dazzlingly imagistic storytelling, dense metaphors, and intriguing characters held at a little bit of a distance from the reader. This is strangely impersonal storytelling, beautiful and moving but at a careful remove.
The novel's protagonist is a nomenclature consultant, working at a marketing company to give new names to products to help reinvent them for the modern marketplace. Naturally, he is never given a name in the novel. It's that kind of book. As nomenclature consultant, he is given decisionmaking power to decide a deadlock over the choice between three names for a town: The name of the longtime industrialist it's carried for a century, the name its free black founders originally gave it, or the name the town's new billionaire hired a marketing firm to dream up. The names represent three American dreams that occupy different places on the aspirational/established axis, different places that different members of the community want to believe they occupy.
The protagonist finds a fourth way, unexpectedly in the novel's last pages. It's a strange journey to get there, there are lulls in the action that take some getting used to, but I think it's worth getting to the end and learning what hurt Whitehead thinks we're hiding.
a: whitehead colson, african-american, modernism
Like The Intuitionist, it's full of dazzlingly imagistic storytelling, dense metaphors, and intriguing characters held at a little bit of a distance from the reader. This is strangely impersonal storytelling, beautiful and moving but at a careful remove.
The novel's protagonist is a nomenclature consultant, working at a marketing company to give new names to products to help reinvent them for the modern marketplace. Naturally, he is never given a name in the novel. It's that kind of book. As nomenclature consultant, he is given decisionmaking power to decide a deadlock over the choice between three names for a town: The name of the longtime industrialist it's carried for a century, the name its free black founders originally gave it, or the name the town's new billionaire hired a marketing firm to dream up. The names represent three American dreams that occupy different places on the aspirational/established axis, different places that different members of the community want to believe they occupy.
The protagonist finds a fourth way, unexpectedly in the novel's last pages. It's a strange journey to get there, there are lulls in the action that take some getting used to, but I think it's worth getting to the end and learning what hurt Whitehead thinks we're hiding.
a: whitehead colson, african-american, modernism