aperçu

One such aperçu involved his interrogation of the phrase “unapologetically Black,” with him saying, “I am not unapologetically anything, because when I say that I have already apologized.”

Certainly there are plenty of suspects behaving badly, chief among them Carlo herself, a freelance snark machine with a hole in her heart and an alcohol-fueled taste for the piercing aperçu.

I guess we could fault Caleb for this aperçu, but in a novel that purports to be about the slippery idea of authorship, let’s blame Lipstein.

“It’s an aperçu of Alex Trebek, human being. What is he like? What has he done? How did he screw up? Things like that.”

Its leadoff lyrical hook—“Why’re men great till they gotta be great?”—serves as both the song’s aperçu and its cri de cœur, its snarkily feminist call to arms.