Word: novelizations
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Colson Whitehead is, along with Jhumpa Lahiri, almost certainly the most critically adored American novelist under 40. To be really sure about it, you'd need some kind of hypothetical rave-ometer (which, come to think of it, is kind of a Whiteheadian idea), but after two novels--The Intuitionist and John Henry Days--he has been awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant, praised by John Updike and Jonathan Franzen and compared (by this magazine) to Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. So it's a bit of a surprise to find that his third novel, Apex Hides the Hurt (Doubleday...
...premise of Apex Hides the Hurt is slim even for a slim novel (212 pages, generously spaced). Our hero is a nomenclature consultant, a man whose job is thinking up names for products--"healing the disquiet of anonymity through the application of a balming name." He's a mordant, gloomy, heavy-lidded fellow given to hiding in his hotel room, nursing the memory of a recent professional calamity, the nature of which we learn only gradually...
There is a truth at the heart of this novel, although that doesn't make it good. The truth is that names can reveal the hidden essence of a thing, but they can also conceal it. That is an insight the reader will arrive at long before Whitehead's protagonist does (you may possibly be aware of it before opening the book). In the meantime he mopes around town riffing on the ephemera of small-town America and indulging his obsession with brand names. The tone is light, by turns over- and underwritten. Our hero seems as uninterested...
...Thug”) bumbles out of his existentially meaningless life of violence when he steals a car and only later discovers a baby in the back seat. “Tsotsi” is adapted from award-winning playwright Athol Fugard’s compelling and humanistic novel by the same name. Both Hood and Fugard cling tightly to literary motifs, using themes of “decency” and “identity” to develop the protagonist from a street-hardened boy to a compassionate man with whom an audience can empathize...
...novel follows Lee Fiora, a thoughtful and observant 14-year-old, as she traverses through the social hierarchies and bureaucratic pyramids of the fictional Ault School in Massachusetts...