Because Colson Whitehead wrote it. And Colson Whitehead also wrote The Intuitionist, which is a fantastic book that crams together sci-fi conceits with noir stylings and meditations on being black in America and manages to give all these disparate things room to breathe and thrive without losing sight of the story or the characters. And it was his first novel. I’ll refer to the Library Journal pullquote used on Amazon to describe my feelings concerning his underwhelming follow-up, John Henry Days:
A John Henry festival in a small West Virginia town draws a diverse crowd, including J. Sutter, a freelance writer going from one event to another in search of free food and paid expenses; and Pamela Street, a restless woman grieving for her father. Both are forced to reevaluate their lives, brought together by bonds of race and history. The author has tried to make this novel an epic saga by filling it with cameo characters and vignettes tracing the history of John Henry’s legend and the song that sprang from it, but they are too one-dimensional for the reader to care. Too many characters and a forced writing style make this an unremarkable work about wasted lives and superficial people.
Sadly, you could just Mad-Lib the above and have it apply to Apex Hides The Hurt, except you’d need to lower your expectations with regards to actually enjoying the book. Instead of a freelance writer, there’s a reticent “nomenclature consultant” at the center of this book, a hotshot in his particular field that’s not exactly brimming with confidence. Instead of a small West Virginia town, our protagonist goes to an unspecified small town called Winthrop that’s brought in the aforementioned consultant to help with a town name change. And, of course, Our Hero, burdened by the soulless drudgery of naming things, is forced to re-evaluate his life via researching the town’s racially-charged history. Except who gives a shit, because Our Hero’s an out-of-touch, seemingly-gormless, partially-agoraphobic dipshit so wrapped up in his own pampered ponderous nonsense that the book’s unearned climax and anti-resolution comes as a relief, not the monumental earth-shattering revelation Whitehead seems to want it to be.
In short: Our Hero learns that the town’s name was supposed to be Struggle, but was instead changed to Winthrop due to some well-greased palms, so instead of going with the proposed new name of New Prospera, Our Hero ends his consultancy by righting a wrong and giving the town the name it should’ve had from the start. It takes about 200ish pages to get to this point. Along the way, the reader is pelted with pithy-cum-awkward meditations on life, awful product branding that’s not even enjoyably awful (cf. Apex, the name of the #2 bandage on the market that’s actually flesh-colored in a multi-racial fashion, not “flesh-colored” in a Caucasian fashion), redundant interjections phrased like ad slogans, and a pointless fact-finding mission that matter-of-factly reveals the secret history of the town while Our Hero stumbles around with an infected toe wondering what’s wrong with this crazy mixed-up world we live in.
I’m guessing that the out-of-step protagonist is supposed to be kept at a distance (though the flashbacks that detail his burgeoning disillusionment might suggest otherwise), and that this book is more of a thoughtful polemic on the insidious presence of marketing in today’s society (among some other things that might or might not be fully realized). To be honest, I’d rather read a straight-up essay on Whitehead’s thoughts concerning this than a dispassionate fictionalized version. If you’re going to mount to a bully pulpit, say what you mean, and say it with some conviction. Apex is too cautious, too self-aware, and too assured of its supposed cleverness to really say much of anything worth a second thought.
