"To see this age! A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit. How
quickly the wrong side may be turned outward! . . . Words are grown so
false, I am loath to prove reason with them." So Feste the jester
laments in "Twelfth Night." Or pretends to lament. Or truly does
lament, under the pretense of pretense. (Like our own late-night
jesters -- David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert -- Feste is
ironic even about being an ironist.) He's not really the Lady Olivia's
fool, he says: he's "her corrupter of words," and, like
Shakespeare's
still greater Fool in "King Lear," he uses corruption of language to
purify meaning. In his age, as in ours, wise fools sabotage words to
get at the truth.
-- David Gates in a review of
Colson Whitehead's third novel Apex Hides the Hurt,
New York Times Book Review, April 2, 2006, p. 12.