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), is a rather modest affair, slender and...
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