Another Colson Whitehead Post

 I admire Colson Whitehead. Another writer I caught up with in prison. Other posts about him are here.

One novel read and one that left me a little confused was Apex Hides the Hurt. Bailey Sincox's B-Sides: Colson Whitehead’s “Apex Hides the Hurt” from Public Books ended my confusion and reinforces my reasons for reading Whitehead.

The word renaming in 2023 likely brings to mind what happened to many buildings, monuments, and institutions in the wake of Black Lives Matter. That makes this a perfect time to revisit Colson Whitehead’s 2006 Apex Hides the Hurt, in which the Black protagonist is tasked with renaming a town with a complicated and contested history. But Whitehead’s is no sober allegory of American racial politics. Instead, it is a symbolic send-up, a long-form pun.

Apex does not look much like Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novels, The Nickel Boys (2019) and The Underground Railroad (2016). Both are closer to his debut The Intuitionist (1999), which literalizes W. E. B. Du Bois’s idea of “racial uplift” in the character of a Black elevator inspector. In a style we might call allegorical realism, Railroad links stages of American history (slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow) via a subterranean steam engine.

Apex has allegorical elements, but it is also a satire. It is the closest Whitehead comes to channeling Ishmael Reed, whose Flight to Canada is an irreverent rewrite of the antebellum slave narrative.

The novel’s nameless protagonist is a nomenclature consultant. His claim to fame is having come up with “Apex,” the name of a Band-Aid competitor that comes in more than one flesh color. Unsurprisingly, sticking a bandage on the “hurt” of racist history precipitates a new crisis.

***

Equal parts mock-heroic and absurd, the toe injury awakens Apex’s protagonist to the fact that he “deals in lies and promises, distills them into syllables.” In his toeless enlightenment, he reviles Winthrop’s white-picket-fence suburbia and Lucky’s corporate vision as much as his own prestigious education and corner office with a view. Being down a digit lends him a critical distance.

However, towns and bandages are not the only things getting new names. This is where Apex surprises, perhaps more so in 2023 than in 2006. Via renaming, Whitehead’s satire takes aim more generally at a capitalist system that senses the profits to be made from proclaiming that systemic racism is a thing of the past.

The protagonist’s neurosis only intensifies when a white colleague tells him, “Wise up: you are the product.” It is not just that his Blackness is selling clients a self-congratulatory notion of their own progressive politics. Worse, he has been buying into it himself, taking his success as evidence of a postracial world.

***

Ending on a note of cynical irresolution, Apex suggests that the best name is probably not the “balming” one. Yet it also suggests that names are beside the point. True change will take longer than a rebrand

Follow the link above and get yourself a copy.

sch 7/5 

Updated 7/16/2023 with material from The Guardian.

Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead review – a dazzling sequel to Harlem Shuffle

Two-time Pulitzer-winning author Whitehead shows no sign of resting on his laurels. Crook Manifesto continues the brilliantly realised sequence that began with Harlem Shuffle, intricately depicting cultural history and family drama with the compelling energy of a crime thriller and the sharp wit of social satire. Harlem itself is one of the lead characters, and there are echoes of other chroniclers of this burg such as James Baldwin and Chester Himes. In ambition and scope, in the way the intimate is so deftly weaved with the epic, one is also reminded of Balzac. Whitehead has embarked on a great comédie humaine of his own.

Colson Whitehead: ‘A city summons you into its weird drama’ (Interview)

Name a book that inspired you to write.

Until I got to college, I wanted to write horror fiction. My mom would buy the new Stephen King every year and when I was 12 I read Carrie. Obviously, it’s a story about a teenager with psychokinetic powers, but the structure is really interesting. The story jumps forward in time and is interspersed with congressional reports about the incident in the town two years later, and newspaper reports detailing the disaster that happens 100 years in the future of the book. I thought, oh, this is cool – I’d love to write, like, a vampire or werewolf story that’s kind of messed up and has a weird chronology and plays with perspective

sch