In his new novel “Apex Hides the Hurt” (Doubleday, $23), Colson Whitehead tells the story of a nameless nomenclature (or naming) consultant whose job is to go to a small middle American town with a tortured past and rename it. Whitehead uses his sharp satirical wit to explore America’s troubled racial history, the willingness of its citizens to cover up what is rotting, and a preference for new starts in life.
Whitehead’s anonymous consultant is a man adrift, whose high-flying career as the namer of Apex Bandages, adhesive strips that come in all racial hues, has crashed and burned. He has also wound up with a mysterious limp. His shot at redemption comes when he has to find a new name for the postindustrial town of Winthrop in the central United States.
For Whitehead, the new novel brought together two very different interests. “About eight years ago, I read an article about the naming of Prozac,” said Whitehead, from a hip cafe near his home in New York City. “Over the past few years, I was also thinking about residential and commercial zoning, and how we try to regulate where people live.
“In this case, it was how to combine a story about a corporate namer with something about zoning laws and how communities develop. Eventually, I came up with the idea of a man being forced to name a town.”
Though Whitehead had written about gentrification in New York City neighborhoods for various magazines, he created a fictional town for “Apex.” “I couldn’t really make the town New York City,” said Whitehead. “I had to make it someplace unknown. As a New Yorker, everything west of here is the Great Unknown. It is a blank slate that I can fill up with things.”
In “Apex,” the tortured consultant comes into town like a Clint Eastwood character in a spaghetti Western. He is immediately pulled around by the local special interests – Lucky Aberdeen, the Internet millionaire who wants to remake the old town into New Prospera, a New Economy gem; Albie Winthrop, the bankrupt scion of the town’s old industrialist family who thinks Winthrop is a fine name; and Regina Goode, the town’s black mayor and descendant of its ex-slave founders, who wants the town to be called by its original name, Freedom. The eccentric, addled consultant, however, may have some naming plans of his own.
“The consultant is the master of his world, and he coasts on his talents,” said Whitehead. “He has an accident, but he doesn’t do anything with the knowledge that he gains from being outside of the loop. His interactions with the people in the town move him along. He starts to take the reins and does a powerful act.”
In the novel, the super-bandage he names Apex builds the consultant’s career, but it also leads to his mysterious disfigurement. In Whitehead’s satirical world, the multi-ethnic bandage, where people of all colors are welcome, represents an unhealthy covering up of racial problems.
“That’s what I am getting at. Does a product like Apex solve anything?” said Whitehead, 36, who is African-American. “Does it end racism, because with different-colored bandages people can look at themselves and see themselves? Does naming your new home Freedom erase your 200 years in slavery here?”
Renaming the town in the novel presents an ambivalent situation. Is it wiping out history or offering a fresh start? “It is obliteration, but it is also a rebirth,” said Whitehead. “What Lucky wants is the new stage, which is New Prospera. It is the assertion of power over the thing you are erasing. Renaming a neighborhood is about marketing and hope, and these grand ideas we have for a neighborhood.”
Whitehead’s sense of irony and satire was honed growing up in Manhattan. “I come from a TV-watching family,” he said. “We had cable from the day that it was invented. I watched the Richard Pryor and George Carlin comedy specials from the time that I was 8 or 9. My family also has a sardonic sense of humor.”
Whitehead’s first novel, “The Intuitionist,” involved a black elevator repairwoman trying to solve a murder. The second novel, “John Henry Days,” concerned an African-American man addicted to press junkets. With “Apex,” Whitehead continues to use satire to examine race in America. “It is the way I see the world,” said Whitehead. “I can’t help it.”
In “Apex,” Whitehead returns to the corporate doublespeak that he used so well in “John Henry Days.”
“If you look at ‘John Henry Days’ and ‘Apex,’ I find the machine, whether it is the publicity machine or the corporate machine, including its rules and codes, very interesting,” said Whitehead. “I’ve never had a corporate job, but I did have a drone job at an Internet start-up company in San Francisco for three months. I find Midtown (New York City business) culture amusing and keep going back to it.”
The New Prospera of Lucky Aberdeen seems to be a soulless place, where content people in golf shirts and khakis seem to be constantly jumping on and off minibuses heading toward various corporate retreats. Whitehead claims that it is not a smug parody, but his view of reality.
“In describing Lucky’s new corporate town, I am describing the modern culture,” said Whitehead. “It is not satire as much as it is a straightforward observation.”
For Whitehead, marriage and a 17-month-old daughter have mellowed the more biting commentary that he used so effectively in “John Henry Days.”
“I’m definitely less judgmental than I used to be,” said Whitehead. “That ‘stick it to the straights’ humor was more present in ‘John Henry Days.’ Maybe it has run its course for me. It’s been six years since I wrote ‘John Henry Days.’ A lot of stuff has gone on. I’m not the snide hipster anymore.”
Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.
