Invisible man

AFRICAN AMERICANS have always had a particular relationship with names. Four centuries ago, they were forced to renounce their tribal identities and, for some, take the surnames of slave masters; there’s been a backlash ever since. Such a backlash includes casting off the generations-old “slave” names and claiming African ones, tweaking traditional European names with singular spellings and pronunciations that can be read as either deferential or defiant (Travon, LaCarol) and, always, hashing out the proper generic -- Negro, black, African American. Of the million social and cultural disconnects that are part of the black experience, names speak the loudest, although they often speak just as loudly to an elusive sense of self-worth that blacks have largely had to create for themselves -- Excell, Precious, Princess, Queen.

Colson Whitehead mines the possibilities of naming with admirable abandon in his new novel, “Apex Hides the Hurt.” The story of a black professional who makes an upper-middle-class living as a “nomenclature consultant” -- someone who creates names and slogans for new products -- it is a satire on several levels, not all of them successful; the book reserves the right to drop the mask and be serious when it chooses, a right it doesn’t always deserve. Admittedly, Whitehead has given himself a tough assignment, savaging the soullessness of corporate culture and, to a lesser degree, the modern black freedom struggle. Still, in using naming as an emblem of American corporate ennui -- a once-creative idea that has run dry -- Whitehead more than ties the two ideas together in one kinetic whole.

“Apex’s” antihero is black, a fact that’s not revealed immediately; he’s also nameless, which is important because his chief identity is not as a black man but as a corporate archetype, albeit one with a history. Once a whiz in the industry, his shining moment came when he reinvented a musty adhesive bandage as the new and improved Apex, a “multicultural” bandage that makes strips to match every skin tone under the sun. But this successful convergence of marketing and diversity also leads to the antihero’s bizarre -- and literal -- fall from grace, revealed in unnecessarily drawn-out flashbacks throughout the book.

More engaging is the novel’s main story, in which Whitehead’s naming expert returns to work, after a self-imposed exile, with an assignment to help redefine the small Middle American town of Winthrop. The town fathers -- and mother -- want not only to update the name of their community but also to settle the related question of its legacy. Do the town’s roots lie with the white Winthrop who founded the barbed-wire business that sparked its economy or to the black freedom-seeking pioneers who first pitched their tents there and called it something else? Did the blacks hold their ground with the whites who came later, or did they compromise themselves into irrelevance?

This quest for truth and identity is the novel’s real engine; contract notwithstanding, renaming Winthrop is ancillary, as it has been for some time. In fact, a new town name is already being floated -- New Prospera -- which is just as well for the protagonist, who is suffering from something akin to writer’s block. He’s getting paid handsomely for doing nothing, which both amuses and torments him, but like any good post-postmodern American, he keeps trying to maintain an ironic distance from the whole thing. It’s the racial question, though, that keeps him close -- after all, Winthrop’s history is his history too. He knows instinctively that this, and not the bonuses and condos, will make his life whole, that it will not hide the hurt, as the Apex slogan brightly promises, but finally heal it.

The material here is rich and dense -- so much so that it could easily sink under its own weight, were it to become too preachy or self-consciously clever. Whitehead mostly avoids such problems by confronting them head on -- exaggerating everything, blowing it all up. At times, however, the exaggeration feels indiscriminate. The author has to balance the ridiculous with the real, and he doesn’t always pull it off. He mocks everyone in repeated detail, from the town librarian to an irate cleaning lady to the current town doyen, Albie Winthrop, a neoliberal schlub who goes by “Uncle Albie.” Too often, he can’t resist the temptation of irony, and his big ideas are sometimes overwhelmed by one wink-wink or metaphor too many.

But when things are at rest, when the protagonist simply sits and observes his circumstances, Whitehead shines. “Truth be told, most of the time he didn’t know what white people were talking about, but from the references to insourcing and gainsharing, he hypothesized that the two guys sitting across from him on the shuttle bus had just returned from a confab on corporate values,” he writes in one of his many riffs on Winthrop. “The words they used were strange, odd souvenirs, tiny fragments that had been chipped off an alien business meteorite. This was language from outer space. They wore leis. Some wore more than others, and he gathered that the flower necklaces were the unit of measure for reward.”

Here, you get the sense that Whitehead knows of what he writes, that the myopia of his characters, their failure to focus, is exactly what he means to expose. The multilayered identity crisis of a black man living large but still living in the shadows is a subtle tragedy that Whitehead reveals with unsubtle methods -- no mean feat. In the end, “Apex Hides the Hurt” is a satire that’s less funny than discomforting, which puts it in the tradition of other narratives about black states of being that border on absurdist -- Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” Cecil Brown’s “The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger.” Tragedy and comedy, success and failure, invisibility and visibility: To be black is still to live out the existential riddle of race, whether in a slum untouched by time or in a high-rise apartment paid for by an endeavor once called advertising but reborn, appropriately, as nomenclaturing.

Of course, Whitehead’s protagonist has plenty to think about besides being black, and the author is actually more compelling when he’s musing not on race, but on a kind of Seinfeldian nothingness. In the novel’s opening sequence, he describes the satisfactions -- such as they are -- of his character’s vocation: “He saw the names on the packaging printed over and over. Even when the gum wrappers were bunched up into little beetles of foil and skittered in the gutters, he saw the name printed on it and knew it was his. When they were hauled off to the garbage dump, the names blanched in the sun on the top of the heap and remained, even though what they named had been consumed. To have a name imprinted along the bottom of a Styrofoam container: this was immortality. He could see the seagulls swooping around in depressed circles. They could not eat it at all.”

It’s engaging and provocative stuff, and there’s plenty more where that comes from. But ultimately, “Apex” falls short because its protagonist, engaging as he is, lacks heart. The man with no name makes perfect sense thematically, but themes do not draw us into a novel, people do. We don’t need to put a name to a face, but we do need a face; at some point, we need to feel the depth of this man’s haplessness rather than read another description of it. He must be called forth, or the black Everyman risks being no man. And that’s a state of being with no name at all.