APEX HIDES THE HURT

Name: APEX HIDES THE HURT
Author: Colson Whitehead
ISBN: 0-385-50795-X

by Colson Whitehead ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2006

While making no attempt at depth of characterization, Whitehead audaciously blurs the line between social realism and...

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Cultural insight, conceptual ingenuity and cutting-edge humor distinguish the third novel by a New York writer who never fails to engage and intrigue.

A rose by any other name would smell rotten, or so suggests the high-priced “nomenclature consultant” who serves as the protagonist for this allegory about how branding has become such a crucial signifier of meaning in America (and providing names has become a lucrative enterprise, in this novel at least). While Whitehead’s latest lacks the epic scope of John Henry Days (2001), it is every bit as thematically ambitious and provocative. Within the supersizing, homogenizing and mass-merchandising of American culture, names are crucial, the protagonist insists, as signals for cognitive response. Thus, it’s all the more significant that this protagonist goes unnamed throughout the narrative, though the reader surmises that he is a young African-American who encounters plenty of white people (and white values) within the social and professional circles in which he operates. Most of the plot concerns a town that is in the midst of an identity crisis. A development-minded, high-tech entrepreneur is campaigning to change its name from Winthrop to New Prospera, and the town has enlisted the consultant’s involvement in the re-branding. The last remaining (and fairly addled) member of the white Winthrop family resists the change; so does the mayor, a black woman descended from a family with deep roots in the increasingly Caucasian community. As the protagonist delves deeper into the history of Winthrop, he gets a better understanding of just what the name change entails (it turns out that the town has changed its name before). At times, the confluence of racial issues and branding issues threatens thematic overload, though a crucial backstory concerning “flesh-colored” bandages (the “Apex” of the title) and a meditation on the various names that have been applied to the protagonist’s race bring the two strains together.

While making no attempt at depth of characterization, Whitehead audaciously blurs the line between social realism and fabulist satire.

Pub Date: March 21, 2006

ISBN: 0-385-50795-X

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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CROOK MANIFESTO
by Colson Whitehead

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HARLEM SHUFFLE
by Colson Whitehead

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THE NICKEL BOYS
by Colson Whitehead

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SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES

by Ray Bradbury ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1962

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A somewhat fragmentary nocturnal shadows Jim Nightshade and his friend Will Halloway, born just before and just after midnight on the 31st of October, as they walk the thin line between real and imaginary worlds. A carnival (evil) comes to town with its calliope, merry-go-round and mirror maze, and in its distortion, the funeral march is played backwards, their teacher's nephew seems to assume the identity of the carnival's Mr. Cooger. The Illustrated Man (an earlier Bradbury title) doubles as Mr. Dark. comes for the boys and Jim almost does; and there are other spectres in this freakshow of the mind, The Witch, The Dwarf, etc., before faith casts out all these fears which the carnival has exploited... The allusions (the October country, the autumn people, etc.) as well as the concerns of previous books will be familiar to Bradbury's readers as once again this conjurer limns a haunted landscape in an allegory of good and evil. Definitely for all admirers.

Pub Date: June 15, 1962

ISBN: 0380977273

Page Count: 312

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1962

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
REMEMBRANCE
by Ray Bradbury ; edited by Jonathan R. Eller

- BOOK REVIEW
THE STORIES OF RAY BRADBURY
by Ray Bradbury

- BOOK REVIEW
WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS
by Ray Bradbury

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BUNNY

by Mona Awad ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 11, 2019

Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for...

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A viciously funny bloodbath eviscerating the rarefied world of elite creative writing programs, Awad’s latest may be the first (and only?) entry into the canon of MFA horror.

Samantha Heather Mackey is the single outsider among her fiction cohort at Warren University, which is populated by Bunnies. “We call them Bunnies,” she explains, “because that is what they call each other.” The Bunnies are uniform in their Bunniness: rich and hyperfeminine and aggressively childlike, fawning over each other (“Can I just say I loved living in your lines and that’s where I want to live now forever?”), wearing kitten-printed dresses, frequenting a cafe where all the food is miniature, from the mini cupcakes to the mini sweet potato fries. Samantha is, by definition, not a Bunny. But then a note appears in her student mailbox, sinister and saccharine at once: an invitation to the Bunnies’ Smut Salon, one of their many Bunny customs from which Samantha has always been excluded, like “Touching Tuesdays” or “making little woodland creatures out of marzipan.” And even though she despises the Bunnies and their cooing and their cloying girlishness and incomprehensible stories, she cannot resist the possibility of finally, maybe being invited into their sweet and terrifying club. Smut Salon, though, is tame compared to what the Bunnies call their “Workshop,” which, they explain, is an “experimental” and “intertextual” project that “subverts the whole concept of genre,” and also “the patriarchy of language,” and also several other combinations of creative writing buzzwords. (“This is about the Body,” a Bunny tells Samantha, upon deeming her ready to participate. “The Body performing in all its nuanced viscerality.”) As Samantha falls deeper into their twee and terrifying world—drifting from her only non-Bunny friend in the process—Awad (13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, 2016) gleefully pumps up the novel’s nightmarish quality until the boundary between perception and reality has all but dissolved completely. It’s clear that Awad is having fun here—the proof is in the gore—and her delight is contagious.

Wickedly sharp, if not altogether pleasant, it’s a near-perfect realization of a singular vision—and definitely not for everyone.