needs more demons?

Apex Hides the Hurt is a slippery little book. On its surface, it’s the story of a nomenclature consultant — tellingly, he himself goes un-named — who is summoned to a small town to break the unlikely deadlock of its triumvirate City Council: the young (white) technology tycoon in the Gates/Bezos mold wants to rechristen the town in forward-thinking. upwardly-mobile newspeak; the old descendant of the (white) town forefathers wants to keep the name his ancestors gave the place; the young descendant of the (black) town founders wants to restore the settlement’s original name.

The consultant, even in careful third-person, is clearly a narrator of some unreliability. He has suffered what he refers to only as a “misfortune,” the details of which are only gradually doled out in his reminisces, but which has left him with a limp, a profound anti-sociability, and an ambiguous, undeniable, but non-crippling stain on his professional reputation. Whitehead’s prose is a meticulous marvel: sparing of adjectives and adverbs, generous with the remoteness and blame-shedding of passive voice, it often uses pronouns and unattributed dialogue to convey a confusion that perhaps mirrors the consultant’s mental state. Even most of the named characters are blank, generic: Field, Goode, Lucky, Tipple.

The novel is sprinkled with references to actual brands like Kleenex and Band-Aid, but Whitehead also unambiguously describes brands we know by other names, like “Admiral Java”:

It was not the first time he had been saved by the recognizable logo of an international food franchise, its emanations and intimacies. No matter what time zone you happened to be in, the Admiral’s doors pushed in with the same slight resistance, freeing the vapors of the latest excursion into Africa, South America, or Blend. He listened to the sound of the brewing machines, their staccato gurgling. It was black gold bubbling from the earth’s crust, the elemental crude. He approached the teenagers with a smile, and they smiled back. All over the nation teenagers served the sacred logos and he thanked God for the minimum wage.

and “Ehko”:

Statistically speaking, a good part of the Western world has played with Ehko. It was one of the most popular toys in the world. The plastic pieces came in different interlocking shapes, the same four or five hues. Once you learned how to hook the pieces together with that little snap sound, you yourself were hooked for a good stretch of childhood. The tiny bricks were easily misplaced, but the kits came with extras and the prodigal pieces returned eventually, coaxed by brooms, even if it took years.

It’s possible, I think, to frame the novel’s underlying thesis in a single pithy sentence that the nameless consultant would once have approved of, but that would do a disservice both to Apex Hides the Hurt and its prospective readers. I recommend taking the elliptical trip with the consultant, to an everyplace/noplace that might (or might not) be called Winthrop, toward an epiphany that might (or might not) gradually unfold.

A personal aside: once upon a time, I accepted an invitation to deliver a talk at a conference. As luck would have it, a major deadline loomed the week before the conference, and I arrived at my hotel with a laptop computer and the grim necessity of conjuring a compelling presentation out of whole cloth in the scant hours before I was scheduled to deliver it.* Huddled over the uncomfortable desk with the curtains shut tight, I found the banging on my door and the shout, “Housekeeping! Housekeeping!” evoked exactly the same irrational terror that the menacing bellow “Gasman! Gasman!” had when I was out of work and half out of my mind in my slummy first apartment. I have to wonder if Colson Whitehead once had a similiar experience.

*I did. But since I didn’t submit my abstract in time for inclusion in the conference proceedings, no evidence remains. Which has a certain congruence, it seems to me, with Apex Hides the Hurt.

Needs More Demons? At first I thought perhaps, but, on reflection, decidedly not.