Colson Whitehead’s third novel provokes the question: For whom are New York’s literary novels written? In a world where cultural criticism is rampantly available and calibrated to various levels of youth and erudition, what is the purpose of a novel like “Apex Hides the Hurt” (Doubleday, 212 pages, $22.95) – or of Rick Moody’s “The Diviners”? Both novels cup a chunk of high-level media in their hands, coddling and massaging it to produce a novel’s worth of slightly bitter commentary.

Mr. Moody looks at the way an idea can buzz its way through the world of agents and production companies, accidentally producing a movie along the way. It’s a novel about a meme, a selfpropagating idea – the kind of concept that was itself “virally” popular in the 1990s in magazines like Wired or in books with fractals on the cover. Writing a novel about a meme is at first glance ambitious; but at second glance, it looks like a footnote to a decent article on Slate.

Mr. Whitehead’s “Apex Hides the Hurt” takes on the naming industry, the consultants who come up with names for new pharmaceuticals or candy bars. Deliciously timely as this seems, it is an obvious and limited window into our corporate soul.

As far back as 1955, Marianne Moore was hired by the Ford company to name a car.Some of her suggestions were predictably unusable (“Turcotingo”); others were fun but hopeless Latinate neologisms (“Pastelogram”), while some were almost genius (“Mongoose Civique,” “Silver Sword,” “Varsity Stroke”). In the end, Ford decided to name the car after his son, Edsel.

Mr. Whitehead is no Moore, and the names his characters come up with – “Redempta” for an unnamed product or “Loquacia” for an anti-shyness drug – often sound like jokes designed for someone who has recently taken the SAT. From the beginning of “Apex,” it is clear Mr. Whitehead knows he has a tic he can employ, page by page, to generate cute riffs. Though seldom sharp, these are sometimes pleasantly weird, as when Mr.Whitehead considers products to enlarge chins.

More often, however, they resemble dutiful jests from last year’s dinner parties: “Apply Weatheritique for that lived-in look that will make your house into a home.” Many of Mr.Whitehead’s little touches just look wrong. Why does a restaurant called Riverboat Charlie’s call its men’s room “Buccaneers”? Pirates up the Mississippi?

Chestnuts like repetitive stress injury and energy drinks are always at Mr. Whitehead’s fingertips. Isn’t satire supposed to be motivated by some kind of grief? This satire is coolly professional.

Like Sherlock called to the Baskerville estate, Mr. Whitehead’s hero, a disaffected nomenclature consultant, travels to Winthrop, a town that is trying to change its name. After suffering an absurd toe injury, he has a burnout that masquerades as epiphany: He’s suddenly developed an interest in honesty, in seeing the truth behind a name.

Mr. Whitehead writes superfluous metaphors by the book. Reflecting on an overheard conversation that included such words as “insourcing” and “gainsharing,” Mr. Whitehead writes, “The words they used were strange, odd souvenirs, tiny fragments that had been chipped off an alien business meteorite.” At an awards ceremony: “Tipple would make an excellent speech – self-serving, generous, and humble all at once.A three-flavor-super-chocolatevanilla-strawberry-cone of a speech.” That metaphor does nothing but remind us that we are reading a book.

Still, Mr. Whitehead sometimes triumphs: The narrator notes that his “personal space … was not so much a perfect circle, as commonly thought, but an irregular blob shape, jellyfishy hither and yon, and constantly shifting.” He enjoys a Starbucks: “This was the world he moved in, a place of compacts and understandings. It was safe in that embassy.”

As the town’s local history comes to the surface, Mr. Whitehead’s own bemused premise somehow tracks into race matters, and the novel ends with a passive-aggressive swoop. After considering the name “New Prospera,” our hero decides to name the town “Struggling.” A welcome word from Middle English to be sure, “struggling” is hardly a satisfying conclusion to this thin novel.

“Apex” both describes and stimulates an intense need for level honesty. Mr. Whitehead is capable of much better.

blytal@nysun.com