APEX HIDES THE HURT

Colson Whitehead

Fleet, £8.99

From Rosicrucianism to Rumpelstiltskin, names hold a totemic power in all cultures. To be able to bestow them, like Adam naming the animals in the Garden of Eden, is a special privilege which sets one apart from other mortals. To

African-Americans, this ability has even greater resonance, as slave-owners would strip slaves of their identities by replacing their African names with European ones.

The protagonist of Apex Hides the Hurt is a “nomenclature consultant”, a man who thinks up names for products.

It’s embarrassingly easy for him to grasp the essence of a product and find the exact name that will have it flying off the shelves.

The highpoint of his career has been the rebranding of a second-rate sticking plaster as Apex, its unique selling point being that it comes in a variety of skin tones to suit customers of all ethnicities.

Apex may have been his professional peak, but it also indirectly led to him having a breakdown and, like some mythological hero, losing a part of himself.

Fittingly, our nomenclature consultant remains nameless throughout the novel and we’re some way in before it’s revealed that he’s African-American, which prompts a reassessment of what we’ve read so far.

He’s been called out of post-breakdown retirement for an unusual case. The civic leaders of the town of Winthrop are considering changing its name to something more upbeat

that will attract investors, and he’s been called in as a consultant.

Winthrop owes its modest economy to the Winthrop family, who made their fortune manufacturing barbed wire. But Old Winthrop didn’t actually found the town. There was a settlement there already, founded by freed slaves, who agreed to make the white Winthrop the town’s figurehead to make it easier to trade with the outside world.

Which raises the question: instead of sticking with the name Winthrop or going with the snazzy new alternative, should the town choose a third option and revert to the name the original settlers gave it?

Apex Hides the Hurt first came out 12 years ago and is being reissued in the wake of Whitehead’s 2016 bestseller The Underground Railroad.

If it was surfing the zeitgeist then, it’s even more in tune with the racially-charged mood of today.

Interestingly, the novel’s initial reception focused on it as a satire on commercialism – which it certainly is – while playing down its racial themes or, in some cases, ignoring them entirely. Which, once you’ve read it, seems unbelievable.

The novel views its subjects through the lens of corporate satire, perhaps, but is typical of Whitehead’s method of approaching racial issues in an oblique, allegorical way, as he did in The Intuitionist, or as the alternate history of The Underground Railroad.

It’s smartly done, too, Whitehead infusing every page with allusions to power, community, identity and the pursuit of wealth, sometimes interlocking, sometimes smoothly gliding past each other.

It’s somewhat let down

by a certain flatness arising from the protagonist’s

aloof detachment from the people of Winthrop, but the author’s restless imagination and incisiveness never flag.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT