Apex Hides the Hurt

“If he’d planned it correctly, he would have been in a hermit cave in the mountains, two days’ trek from civilization, or in a cabin on the shore of a polluted lake when Roger phoned.”

Whitehead establishes the protagonist as a recluse who shies away from contact with his former colleagues and acquaintances. Words like “hermit cave” and “trek” characterize the protagonist as someone with grandiose, romantic ideas and a sardonic sense of humor—qualities are a source of inner conflict for the protagonist as he struggles to reconnect with the world.

“It was a good place to make a bad decision, and in particular, a bad decision that would affect a great many people.”

The protagonist views his hotel room as a setting for contemplation. His rueful prediction that he will inevitably make a “bad decision” about the town name foreshadows the novel’s conclusion, which will leave readers wondering what the best solution to the problem would have been.

“This is Winthrop. Always will be Winthrop. Shit around here never changes. You can change the name but you can’t change the place. It stays the same.”

The bartender—whose statement contradicts the belief that a new name will fundamentally change the town’s identity—is the only character in the novel who dismisses branding as useless veneer. Still, although he knows the town’s origins, he does not think they need to be publicly acknowledged.

“It didn’t matter if you didn’t understand the language, a good name cut through. Does it sound like candy, does it sound like perfume, does it sound like a fancy car you would like to be seen in. […] In European hotels he could get five countries’ programming in five different languages but it felt like home because he understood the names.”

The protagonist believes that the universality of sound associations—at least in Anglo-European cultures—connects people through consumer culture. When consumerism is the basis for belonging, branded products become indispensable for an individual’s identity. We never learn the protagonist’s name—the products he has named become his defining traits.

“Every day the door cracked another half inch and he could see beyond the tiny rooms he had stumbled around in his whole life. He pictured it like this: The door opened up on a magnificent and secret landscape. His interior. He clambered over rocks and mountain ranges composed of odd and alien minerals, he stepped around strange flora, saplings that curtsied eccentrically, low shrubs that extended bizarre fronds.”

Whitehead emphasizes that the protagonist’s emphasis on brands and consumerism does not mean that he is shallow. On the contrary, the protagonist discovered a rich inner world when he began his career as a nomenclature consultant.

“Across the square he saw the dark entrance of the Hotel Winthrop, the frosted glass, the somber gleam of brass in the sick light.”

This sentence is an example of Whitehead’s style, which adds emotion and atmosphere through physical descriptions. It is raining in Winthrop when the protagonist arrives; the words “dark,” “somber,” and “sick” indirectly imply that he senses foreboding in the environment.

“Something still consumed the founding father’s attention outside the frame after all those years, a loping fox or an escaping slave. No, he corrected himself: there weren’t slaves this far west—the bartender himself had told him that the town had been founded by freed slaves. So it had to be something else.”

The portrait of Sterling Winthrop in the bar perplexes the protagonist because he cannot see the object of the man’s gaze in the frame. The passage’s subtext is that Winthrop’s gaze is predatory, that Winthrop wants to catch or subdue whatever or whomever appears outside the frame.

“From the balcony he could look down upon the city and think he owned it. And perhaps that feeling was in the mix when he came up with Apex. He looked down on everything. It was all so small.”

The narrator is foreshadowing the protagonist’s fall from grace, which is in part motivated by his feelings of superiority. The view from his new high-rise apartment symbolizes his distanced and judgmental view of others. It plays on themes of ownership, corporate power, and self-isolation.

“The Winthrops made their fortune in barbed wire, not too bad a gig at the end of the nineteenth century. Land grants, land grabs, you needed something cheap to keep everything in, and keep everything out.”

Barbed wire is another metaphor for ownership and the dangers that one faces for violating another’s property. Surrounding Freedom in barbed wire (metaphorically) is a commentary on the residents’ loss of autonomy once they agreed to allow Winthrop to set up his factory there.

“After winning over the area’s main inhabitants—a loose band of colored settlers—Winthrop opened up his factory and started producing his famous W-shaped barb, which can still be seen all over the county. Grateful for this fresh start, they passed a law and named the town Winthrop, after the man who had the courage to dream.”

The modern version of the town’s history paints Sterling Winthrop as a benefactor to the people of Freedom while downgrading their status from a town to a “loose band,” which creates the impression that Winthrop brought order and prosperity to a disorganized encampment. This “White Savior” narrative is challenged when the protagonist finds the original town history and learns the underhanded means by which Winthrop established himself.

“He had found, in his life, that it was always a good policy to flee when white people felt compelled to inform you about their black friend, or black acquaintance, or black person they saw on the street that morning.”

While talking to the protagonist, Albie recalls a Black student who lived in his dorm in Quincy, one of only five or six Black young people in the university at the time. While not overtly ill-intentioned, this microaggression signals that Albie is othering the protagonist—this is not a memory Albie would bring up to a white Quincy man.

“One of our teams finishes a project—they’ve been busting their asses day and night—they finish it, show it to me, and what do I say? ‘Good job—but what’s Version 2.0?’ Because whatever it is, it’s not good enough. You can always tweak it, there are always ways to make it better.”

Lucky is addressing the tourists with his vision for New Prospera. Just as the protagonist sees the world through the lens of marketing, Lucky sees the world through the lens of technological innovation. The concept of 2.0 is his life philosophy; the existence of a thing implies that it can be made better. This means that what is current quickly becomes obsolete, a dangerous concept when applied to communities and people.

“The deep psychic wounds of history and the more recent gashes ripped by the present, all of these could be covered by this wonderful, unnamed multicultural adhesive bandage.”

The novel mocks the use of consumer multiculturalism as a fix for dealing with society’s ills. Showing commercials with children of different ethnicities wearing bandages that match their skin tone is not a substitute for doing the difficult work of reckoning with a history of slavery and oppression.

“The little part on the top of the pyramid, tons of stone dragged across the sand to make this thing. The eye on the top of the pyramid as it appears on the dollar bill. He had heard this was a symbol of immense power according to mystics. What the mystics saw was Apex. It was the currency of the world.”

The name Apex combines mystic and commercial power, just as the pyramid on the dollar bill links the modern economy with ancient symbology. Infusing finance with mythological veneer gives it a sense of timelessness, something that is preordained rather than controlled by institutions and individuals.

“What do you call that terrible length of time between when you see that your food is ready and when your waitress drags her ass over to your table with it? […] Tantalasia.”

The protagonist’s creative names underscore the shortcomings of language. There are many experiences, gestures, emotions, and situations, which have not been distilled into a single word. Humorous but insightful, his neologisms provide a new perspective on how we might better communicate with one another.

“Sometimes when I have a hard day and I’m too tired to leave the office and I just want to put my head on my desk, I think about how they got here. In their wagons, all that way from the plantations that had been their homes. Think about that: those places were their homes. Places of degradation and death.”

Regina Goode claims that imagining the settlers’ experiences motivates her to keep going. She contrasts their home life under slavery with their new home in Freedom, arguing that the freedom they built is the reason she can enjoy her life and opportunities.

“We are too easily unmoored these days, he said, and the name will keep us tethered. Ekho Village said values were constant, that times had changed but an idea of ourselves still remained. There is a way of life we have forgotten that is still important.”

Ekho Village, a mass-produced building toy, wants to be a metaphor for the small-town values that have been lost in the age of technology. Branded to appeal to the nostalgia of an older generation who had grown up with Ekho, Ekho Village is a double for Winthrop—an image manufactured to seem quaint while actually being part of the capitalist takeover of small-town life.

“He didn’t know what tripped him up. He couldn’t remember after all that happened what he stubbed his toe on. Later he decided the specifics were not important, that the true lesson of accidents is not the how or the why, but the taken-for-granted world they exile you from.”

Whitehead withholds the specific circumstances of the protagonist’s injury to make a larger point about the nature of accidents. By constantly reliving his accident through his limp, the protagonist has exiled himself from the everyday “taken-for-granted” world. He cannot return to life before his accident.

“Had Apex been shoddier, he would have changed it sooner, but the adhesive bandage looked as fresh as the day he had put it on. The wound had been leaking blood, pus, whatever, but it had all been sopped up by the bandage.”

The narrative of the protagonist’s accident rests on the superiority of the bandage he uses on his toe. The irony is that in helping to rebrand the product, he created the instrument of his own downfall.

“‘Stuff like this makes it all worthwhile,’ [Lucky] croaked. ‘The love you feel sometimes. Sometimes it’s almost equal to the love you put out there.’”

Lucky is describing the set of grilling utensils his employees gave him. The passage reveals that he sees his efforts at developing industry and rebranding the town as charitable rather than self-serving. The comparison “almost” implies that he believes his efforts are never truly recognized.

“Dreaming Is a Cinch When You Stop to Smell the Flowers. Dreaming Is a Cinch When You Crush All Enemies. Dreaming Is a Cinch When You Bathe in the Arterial Spray of the Vanquished.”

A thread that runs through the novel is the title of Lucky’s book. We know that it begins “Dreaming is a Cinch When You,” but never learn the rest—the implication being that the ending is more of the same clichéd claptrap as the start. The protagonist has fun guessing just how viciously Lucky conceptualizes the secret to his success, as his imagined titles escalate in graphic violence and truthfulness about Lucky’s ruthlessness.

“New Prospera. New beginnings, blank slates. For all who came here. Including him.”

The protagonist believes that his experience in Winthrop can give him a new start. He hopes that his life will be different when he gets home, though he does not know if he will accept Tipple’s offer to return to his old job. His desire to change is at war with his fear of the unknown.

“Was he supposed to honor the old ways because they were tried and true? Fuck all Winthrops, and let their spotted hands twist on their chests in agony. And forget the lovers of Freedom. Was he supposed to right historical wrongs? He was a consultant, for Christ’s sake. He had no special powers.”

As the protagonist struggles to make his decision, he feels the weight of the responsibility of naming. The name of a place is connected to history and the generations of people who lived there. The name he chooses will change their legacy, and he does not feel qualified to make such an important decision. This is one of the only moments in the novel in which the protagonist expresses doubt in his abilities.