METAPHOR-DRIVING MAN COLSON WHITEHEAD WIELDS THE HAMMER OF INSIGHT ON ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA.

Byline: David Kronke Staff Writer

In ``John Henry Days,'' Colson Whitehead's smart, funny and trenchant second novel, a group of cynical journalists sums up the feature-story life cycle of an entertainment-world personality: First up is ``Bob's Debut,'' in which a young tyro hits the scene and dazzles everyone in sight.

Clearly, Whitehead himself fell easily into this category: His first novel, 1999's ``The Intuitionist,'' was a brilliant flash of creativity that deftly blended a parody of noir-ish murder mysteries and a cogent yet understated commentary on race relations with the unlikely world of elevator mechanics.

Ah, but from there, things get tricky. In ``Bob Returns,'' the artist, emboldened by early success, becomes selndulgent in his or her sophomore outing. ``Fame has gone to his head ... he tries to tackle too much. ... He may have fallen out of favor among his initial champions.'' It gets worse: ``Bob's Comeback'' is preceded by a creative bottoming out and likely substance abuse; ``Bob's Alive'' finds the artist irrelevant but able to hire a good publicist; ``Bob's Hip'' finds him probably in the throes of campily parodying his original work.

Obviously, Whitehead was preparing for a headlong descent into ``Colson Returns.'' Happily, however, ``John Henry Days'' is hardly an indulgence. The New York Times reviewer, in a front-page rave in its Sunday Book Review section, said, ``Again and again, you hit passages of wry and large-hearted descriptive prose that are the clearest measure of Whitehead's achievement and promise as a writer. ... 'John Henry Days' may end up haunting you the way 'The Ballad of John Henry' haunts its pages.'' Entertainment Weekly recently named him the ``It Sophomore,'' exulting, `` 'John Henry Days' solidifies his rep as the writer to watch.''

Colleagues even admire a guy who, basically, is their competition. ``He's my hero,'' says Ann Patchett (``Bel Canto,'' ``The Patron Saint of Liars''). ``It was brilliant. I thought it should've won the Pulitzer, it was so fantastic.''

``John Henry Days'' uses as a jumping-off point the opportunist misadventures of those journalists, whom Whitehead dubs ``junketeers,'' based on their abilities to get free room, board and T-shirts attached to virtually every seemingly trivial event they cover, which they convert to the pervasive white noise of ubiquitous media coverage of everything that distracts us from what truly matters in life. One of them, a young African-American named J. Sutter, has embarked upon a quest to attend a junket function and be wined and dined for free every day for an entire year - ``the record,'' the other junketeers marvel in incredulous, respectful tones. Whitehead juxtaposes this with sundry examinations of the myth of John Henry, the black man who was able to out-perform a steam drill in laying rail line across America, as it appears in American culture, from piano rolls to sheet music to an ill-fated Broadway musical starring Paul Robeson.

In the process, he creates an ironic counterpoint between the heroic John Henry, who gives his life shoveling dirt up a mountain for the country to grow and thrive, and a hack writer shoveling puff pieces into various frivolous media organs for a quick and meaningless buck.

John Henry became celebrated in song and, eventually - this much of Whitehead's story is true - was immortalized on a postage stamp. The question remains, however - though John Henry beat the steam engine, he died, and yet he became a central figure in African-American mythmaking: So, did he win the contest?

``It's a very deep ambiguity and very central to his popularity, because the song ends and you're left with this nagging question, 'What's this song about?' '' Whitehead notes, sitting outside an Eagle Rock coffee shop - he's from New York, so he actually enjoys the sunny heat. Quaffing in equal parts an iced coffee and a series of Winston Lights, he's the quintessential blend between high-minded literary light and low-key joker. For example, he'll politely chide you for your taste in comic books, but he'll do it in a friendly and empirically logical fashion so that you'll decisively know that, all along, in your formative days, you were reading the wrong comics.

John Henry's heroism is, ultimately (and aside from Marvel vs. DC in the comics department), an ambiguity that Whitehead prefers to leave to individual readers. But he notes, ``As we get to the present, people's machines become more metaphorical - sledge hammers vs. sheet music vs. vinyl recording technology vs. laptop computers.''

Whitehead was an admitted major media geek growing up - `` 'Access Hollywood' was always doing a piece on 'Spin City' the night it was on; I made that connection really early as a kid'' - but the most formative medium for the writer was comic books. ``As (National Book Award winner Jonathan) Lethem says, all the writers he knows are secret comic-book fans. If you spending your life reading comics all day - I think my first thought was, 'I want to write the X-Men.' So I think the geeky strain helps you become a writer.''

The author then became the TV critic for the Village Voice, where he developed his cynicism toward the media while listening to the paper's allegedly liberal editors ignore the specifics of the Eleanor Bumpurs incident - in which white cops gunned down an innocent black woman - in favor of creating the spiffiest headline (an incident re-created, hilariously and disquietingly, in ``John Henry Days'').

``I used to sit in on the headline meetings,'' Whitehead remembers. ``There's a weird undertone at times, because they're not engaged in the subject, in this case, the murder of a handicapped woman by the police; it's about who has the most clever pop-culture reference.''

(Where does Whitehead's TV-criticism predilections lean him nowadays? ``I want to start a charity to pay for free HBO for underprivileged people,'' he says jokingly. ``Throw some benefits, you know.'')

Whitehead fronts a new generation of African-American novelists who don't feel they have to preach to the converted about racial issues. ``In the past, it was done in a very ham-fisted way,'' Whitehead concedes. ``We've had 'X' number of protest novels and 'X' number of escape- from-the-ghetto novels. I think time has passed, and there's not one monolithic black experience that can be captured.

``I just read, just last night, George Wolfe's (play) 'The Colored Museum,' and it was hilarious. It's 'Mama, I'm sick of the Man.' And it's been done to death. There's a black working class, there's a black middle class, there's a black super-rich class, so there's a lot of stories that haven't been told. So I'm freed up from that.

``There's no longer one 'black' writer and what he or she says is the 'black experience.' Ralph Ellison has to replace Richard Wright, and James Baldwin has to replace Ralph Ellison. The Black Power movement has to replace any of those guys. So it's a great time, for me at least. I can do whatever I want. I can talk about race in my own bizarre, back-channel way.''

``John Henry Days''

By Colson Whitehead

389 pages, Doubleday; $24.95

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(1) no caption (Colson Whitehead)

(2) no caption (book: ``John Henry Days'')