Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Whitehead, C. | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
From the MacArthur and Whiting Award--winning author ofJohn Henry DaysandThe Intuitionistcomes a new, brisk, comic tour de force about identity, history, and the adhesive bandage industry When the citizens of Winthrop needed a new name for their town, they did what anyone would do--they hired a consultant. The protagonist ofApex Hides the Hurtis a nomenclature consultant. If you want just the right name for your new product, whether it be automobile or antidepressant, sneaker or spoon, he's the man to get the job done. Wardrobe lack pizzazz? Come to the Outfit Outlet. Always the wallflower at social gatherings? Try Loquacia. And of course, whenever you take a fall, reach for Apex, because Apex Hides the Hurt. Apex is his crowning achievement, the multicultural bandage that has revolutionized the adhesive bandage industry. "Flesh-colored" be damned--no matter what your skin tone is--Apex will match it, or your money back. After leaving his job (following a mysterious misfortune), his expertise is called upon by the town of Winthrop. Once there, he meets the town council, who will try to sway his opinion over the coming days. Lucky Aberdeen, the millionaire software pioneer and hometown-boy-made-good, wants the name changed to something that will reflect the town's capitalist aspirations, attracting new businesses and revitalizing the community. Who could argue with that? Albie Winthrop, beloved son of the town's aristocracy, thinks Winthrop is a perfectly good name, and can't imagine what the fuss is about. Regina Goode, the mayor, is a descendent of the black settlers who founded the town, and has her own secret agenda for what the name should be. Our expert must decide the outcome, with all its implications for the town's future. Which name will he choose? Or perhaps he will devise his own? And what's with his limp, anyway? Apex Hides the Hurtbrilliantly and wryly satirizes our contemporary culture, where memory and history are subsumed by the tides of marketing.
Author Notes
Colson Whitehead was born on November 6, 1969. He graduated from Harvard College and worked at the Village Voice writing reviews of television, books, and music.
His first novel, The Intuitionist, won the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award. His other books include The Colossus of New York, Sag Harbor, and Zone One. He won the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for John Henry Days, the PEN/Oakland Award for Apex Hides the Hurt, and the National Book Award for fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Underground Railroad.
His reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper's and Granta. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Following the novels The Intuitionist (1998) and John Henry Days (2001), and the nonfiction The Colossus of New York (2004), a paean to New York City, Whitehead disappoints in this intriguingly conceived but static tale of a small town with an identity crisis. A conspicuously unnamed African-American "nomenclature consultant" has had big success in branding Apex bandages, which come in custom shades to match any skin tone. The "hurt" of the Apex tag line is deviously resonant, poetically invoking banal scrapes and deep-seated, historical injustice; both types of wounds are festering in the town of Winthrop, which looks like a midwestern anytown but was founded by ex-slaves migrating during Reconstruction. Winthrop's town council, locked in a dispute over the town's name, have called in the protagonist to decide. Of the three council members, Mayor Regina Goode, who is black and a descendant of the town's founders, wants to revert to the town's original name, Freedom. "Lucky" Aberdine, a white local boy turned software magnate, favors the professionally crafted New Prospera; and no-visible-means-of-support "Uncle Albie" Winthrop (also white) sees no sense in changing the town's long-standing name-which, of course, happens to be his own. Quirky what's-in-a-name?-style pontificating follows, and it often feels as if Whitehead is just thinking out loud as the nomenclature consultant weighs the arguments, meets the citizens and worries over the mysterious "misfortune" that has recently shaken his faith in his work (and even taken one of his toes). The Apex backstory spins out in a slow, retrospective treatment that competes with the town's travails. The bickering runs its course listlessly, and a last-minute discovery provides a convenient, bittersweet resolution. Whitehead's third novel attempts to confront a very large problem: How can a society progress while keeping a real sense of history-when a language for that history doesn't exist and progress itself seems bankrupt? But he doesn't give the problem enough room enough to develop, and none of his characters is rich enough to give it weight. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Whitehead, a MacArthur fellow, continues his shrewd and playful inquiry into the American soul in a fresh and provocative tale about a man who comes up with catchy product names. A consultant who names things yet who remains nameless, his claim to fame is the brand name Apex for multiculturally hued Band-Aids. Curiously, he has lost a toe under peculiar circumstances that jibe with the cost of hiding the hurt, per the Apex tagline, and now, limping and moody, he arrives in Winthrop, a small town determined to rename itself. He visits with the last Winthrop, the eccentric descendant of the family that once bankrolled the town with its barbed-wire factory, and is schmoozed by Lucky, CEO of the town's current money magnet, a software company, and Regina, the town's mayor, who traces her roots to the freed slaves who founded the town and called it Freedom. As his stoic hero broods over Winthrop's mixed and vaguely menacing messages, Whitehead marvels over the inventive extravagance and frenzy of American commercialism. Kindred spirit to Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, and Paul Auster, Whitehead archly explicates the philosophy of excess and the poetics of ludicrousness, and he incisively assesses the power inherent in the act of naming. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist
Library Journal Review
What could be more ironic than a story about a nomenclature consultant ("I name things") whose own name is never revealed? That is the case in Whitehead's (The Intuitionist) latest, in which an appellation specialist (he is responsible for Apex, after all, the adhesive bandage that matches a person's skin tone) is called in to help the folks of Winthrop decide what to call their town. After stepping down from a lucrative job at an advertising firm after "his misfortune," he is asked to look into the Winthrop situation. In a fairly brief work, we learn quite a bit about our hero (if such can be used to describe him) and the Winthrop citizenry: the black woman mayor whose ancestors founded the town; Albie Winthrop, a white man whose own ancestor gave it its name; and Lucky Aberdeen, a computer company honcho who thinks the name New Prospera would better suit his plans for the future. Our narrator is also black, but where do his loyalties (and name preferences) lie? Did we mention the limp? In spare and evocative prose, Whitehead does Shakespeare one better: What's in a name, and how does our identity relate to our own sense of who we are? For serious fiction collections in academic and public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/05.]-Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.