What is the name that will give me the dignity and respect that is my right? The key that will unlock the world.

 (Doubleday; 212 pgs; $22.95)

Brands are the masses’ true drug of choice, a pill swallowed gaining you access to the cultural matrix and its consumerist ecstasy. There’s an unsettling current in this cult of brand, where membership means getting a Nike swoosh tattooed on your ankle, putting an Apple Computer sticker on the car, or spending a little too much time rifling through the closet for a perfectly chosen T-shirt to wear at that particular night’s concert. Even so, through all the synergetic ancillary flair, the heart of the brand is still the name.

This strategic positioning of names is ever-present in Colson Whitehead’s newest fictional foray, Apex Hides the Hurt. Whitehead, a MacArthur and Whiting award-winning author, is an artist of considerable talent, having exploded from his days as a television critic at The Village Voice in 1998 to write the much-lauded The Intuitionist.

In that debut, Whitehead offered up a brainy and hyper-realistic tale of New York elevator inspectors and their two rival schools of methodology: the Empiricists, who meticulously go over each cable and bolt; and the Intuitionists, who rely on their own meditations to detect any problems. While both groups struggle to control the elevator inspectors’ guild, the book’s lead, the Intuitionist Lila Mae Watson, the country’s first black female elevator inspector and most accurate in the department, finds herself right in the middle of the battle after an elevator takes a freefall on her watch. It was an exciting debut novel, one that showcased Whitehead’s aptitude to cut his fiction with connotations of class, race, and business without self-aggrandizing the issues as a writer with a lesser faculty would have done.

Whitehead’s second novel, John Henry Days, is a dual tale of the fabled 19th-century black laborer who died from exhaustion just moments after winning a contest against a steam drill, and the more contemporary life of J. Sutter, a young black freelance journalist and “junketeer.” Sutter is traveling to West Virginia to cover a festival and the celebration of a new U.S. postal stamp honoring John Henry, but in a landscape dotted with Confederate flags, the juxtapositions of the American dream and all of its blemishes pull with the same tug as The Intuitionist. Like the literary heir of Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, and Stanley Elkin, Whitehead is able to cradle the unease of American life.

In Apex Hides the Hurt, Whitehead has thinned out the page count, and on the surface, eased back on some of the intricately drawn literary reach under which his previous two novels flourished. Still, the thematic abstraction of Whitehead’s writings is present, this time in the form of a nomenclature consultant, who shrewdly remains nameless and, thereby, unfixed to time and place. The world the protagonist inhabits is one where he readily admits: “To have a name imprinted along the bottom of a Styrofoam container: This was immortality.” He reached such a pinnacle with his naming of “Apex,” the multicultural bandage that gives new inflection to the term “flesh-colored,” by matching everyone’s skin color.

As the novel starts, though, the consultant has left his job after a misfortune resulted in the loss of his toe, and is on his way to Winthrop, a town with a crisis of identity, besieged by the past and the future. The town is looking for a new name, and finding the best way to deal with it was to hire a consultant, bring the expert in to meet with the town leaders as they attempt to sway his opinion.

Considering the town’s original name of Freedom and its founding by freed slaves after the Civil War, the consultant muses on the range and currency of names, especially as labels, like the progression of “Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African-American,” thinking that: “Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth.” It’s this slow march to reality, the naming of names that the protagonist is lost in, even though he has his own part to help map out the terrain. It is a struggle for permanence—one imposed by others, and the attempt to give it to one’s self:

You call something by a name, you fix it in place. A thing or a person, it didn’t matter—the name you gave it allowed you to draw a bead, take aim, shoot. But there was a flip side of calling something by the name you gave it—and that was wanting to be called by the name that you gave yourself. What is the name that will give me the dignity and respect that is my right? The key that will unlock the world.

The consultant’s existential crisis of his own part in this brand anesthetizing of language and culture fills the novel’s arteries, pumping Whitehead’s work with comedy, irony, and sadness. One moment, standing upon his own apex, the expert prepares to announce his decision, only to literally fall off his high horse. It’s only a few pages from the end that we learn of his decision, a name he leaves in an envelope at the hotel’s front desk before he leaves to settle into his new life. His decision is to pull the bandage away, letting “...lesser men try to tame the world by giving it a name that might cover the wound, or camouflage it. Hide the badness from view.”

Whitehead is always going to have a tricky time following up his grand genre-crossing debut, but Apex Hides the Hurt will do little to dissuade readers from understanding they are in the presence of a growing master of American fiction. To Whitehead’s credit, the author seems determined to follow his own career path. Where some writers might have felt pressured to deliver a more mammoth and rambling tome for their third novel, Whitehead slimmed down his landscape with a disciplined grace that loses none of his talent’s breadth. Apex Hides the Hurt drives forward like a Nicholson Baker novel, with minimalist turns uncovering the nuances of life with language—where words and ideas are the real plot. Funny then, that writing a book in which names are always hiding the shame of hurt and identicalness, Whitehead has added to his own brand name, marked with his own exacting vision.

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