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No novelist writing today is more engaging and entertaining when it comes to questions of race, class and commercial culture than Colson Whitehead.
Whitehead's third novel, Apex Hides the Hurt, is a mystery, racial allegory and satire on corporate life and marketing.
He packs a lot into 212 pages about a nomenclature consultant, the fancy name for someone who is paid to think of catchy names for products and companies.
The consultant is not named in the novel. The other characters are, but he's simply he, as in, "He came up with the names."
He's also black, but that's not apparent for 15 pages until a reference to "the white guy." That would be the rich software entrepreneur who's out to rename and reinvent his hometown.
It's called Winthrop for an earlier entrepreneur who made a fortune in barbed wire. The software pioneer wants to name it New Prospera, a marketing ploy, as the thinking goes, that would look good on maps, "nestled among all those Middletons and Shadyvilles."
But complications ensue. Winthrop, vaguely set "out west," has a hidden history. Before it was Winthrop it was called Freedom by its original settlers, blacks freed after the Civil War. And the town's first black mayor knows her history, the unofficial kind.
The consultant is brought to town to settle its name. Whitehead interweaves two stories: Winthrop's identity crisis and how the consultant became a star in the name game.
The novel's title comes from one of his clients' slogans. The company cashed in on a new kind of bandage, not pinkish "flesh," but a range of shades, multicultural bandages for the "great rainbow of our skins."
The bandages aren't very good, but that doesn't matter. The ads do.
As in his previous novels, The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, Whitehead doesn't neglect plot while roping in ideas and observations.
As the story builds, it grows more ambitious, getting at the power and limits of names.
Near the end, the consultant asks, "What did a slave know that we didn't? To give yourself a name is power."
He tells himself that what he gave his clients "had been the right name, but never the true name ... A name that got to the heart of the thing -- that would be miraculous." Whitehead's novel does just that. It gets to the heart of the thing, but in a delightfully roundabout way.
Apex Hides the Hurt
By Colson Whitehead
Doubleday, 212 pp., $22.95
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