Apart from the occasional laugh at corporate machinations, straw henchmen and those who pay for their services, Colson Whitehead’s universally acclaimed book Apex Hides the Hurt comes off as bland as the culture he indicts, and worse, lacks gristle to gnaw on. When Whitehead ostensibly takes on the Great American Cerberus, a three headed monster named Race, Business and Language, you might expect a playfully cynical, but thorny tale of struggle in the brutal American wilderness, written in language that toys with mainstream notions of being “post-race” in a consumer-dominated monoculture.
Fact is, that never happens. You might expect to find the traces of Ellison critics told you to look for, but you won’t. Then again, you may find E. Franklin Frazier, if you were looking for him at all, and if you did, it wouldn’t be in the manner you might expect. Apex Hides the Hurt makes a crude attempt at placing its unnamed, narcissistic narrator outside of history, resulting in the all too predictable “we’re-all-in-this-together” epiphany after about 150 pages of half-assed, half-as-clever-as-he-thinks-it-is marketing prattle, with a bit of mutilation to chronicle our hero’s fall from grace. Literally.
Turns out Jessa Crispin’s delightfully dismissive take was spot on.