The Intuitionist

By: Colson Whitehead

Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez

Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

In a marvelous debut novel that has been compared to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Joseph Heller's ,i>Catch-22, Colson Whitehead has created a strangely skewed world of elevators and the people who control their ups and downs. Lila Mae Watson - the first black female inspector in the world's tallest city - has the highest performance rating of anyone in the Department of Elevator Inspectors. This upsets her superiors, because Lila is an Intuitionist: she inspects elevators simply by the feelings she gets riding in them. When a brand new elevator crashes, Lila becomes caught in the conflict between her Intuitionist methods and the beliefs of the power-holding Empiricists. Her only hope for clearing her name lies in finding the plans of an eccentric elevator genius for the "black box": a perfect elevator. A brilliant allegory for the interaction of the races, The Intuitionist is also an intriguing mystery, solidly grounded by the exceptional narration of Peter Jay Fernandez.

©1999 Colson Whitehead (P)2000 Recorded Books

Brilliant, textured, mind-bending

My son and I listened to this book on a road trip after loving Underground Railroad. What a treat! Starting a third CW book today.

Part mystery, part philosophy, part political

The Intuitionist is a strange book – part mystery, part philosophical musing, part political something.

The parallel that struck me in listening to it was with Brett Easton Ellis’ Glamorama. In Glamorama (another strange book), it comes to the point where everyone in the book is a model, or connected with modeling in some way or other. In The Intuitionist, the inescapable connection is with elevators. Almost every character is an elevator inspector or someone who depends directly on elevators or the elevator inspectors in some way. Even the only school mentioned is the Institute for Vertical Transport – a school whose entire curriculum is geared around inspecting and maintaining elevators.

Lila Mae Watson is the first black woman to become an elevator inspector in a famous city that has to be New York. In her time and place, there are two schools of thought regarding the best way to inspect elevators – empiricism and intuitionism. Empiricists look at the nuts and bolts and cables of elevators to see if they are properly installed and maintained. Intuitionists apparently just sense what is going on – feel the vibes, as it were – and know if something is wrong and what it is. Lila Mae is an Intuitionist, and she is never wrong.

The problem is, a new elevator in a new city building crashes – goes into freefall and is utterly destroyed – less than twenty-four hours after she has inspected it and passed it as ok. This happens in the thick of an election for the head of the elevator inspectors’ union, a contest between an empiricist candidate (the incumbent) and an intuitionist candidate. In this world, somewhat contrary to the usual practice, to be head of the union is also to be head of the municipal department of elevator inspectors. At first, it appears that the elevator has been sabotaged by the empiricists and that Lila Mae has been set up to take the fall for the failure.

There follows a long round of encounters with gangland thug types related to both sides of the struggle, and another sabotage. There are also some flashbacks to Lila Mae’s time in school at the Institute for Vertical Transport, and a lot of reflecting on the theory of elevators, especially as put forth by the hero of the Intuitionists, a certain James Fulton, and the Black Box he proposed as the perfect elevator. Lila Mae is unexpectedly drawn into an attempt to find Fulton’s missing notebooks relating to this Black Box, and in the process, she uncovers the real meaning both of the failed elevator and of the violence surrounding it, and it’s not what she, or we, thought it was.

Excellent

Solidly voiced; layered; dynamic; a new classic coming of age tale; a new classic American novel

Great Pace and Premise

I really liked the pace of this novel, it made it easy to read in just a few sittings. That being said, I felt that at times the story moved too fast and didn’t allow certain characters to fully develop over the pages. However, the premise of the story is great as it developed. Also, the story lacked some clarity at certain parts but that could be a stylistic choice of Whitehead to let the reader do some world building based on their own analysis.
Overall it was a great book I was just expecting a more spectacular climax. I would definitely read it again and probably will in the near future to see what things I missed. The racial allegory was supreme. One of the best debut novels that I’ve read.

hmmm, unusual but interesting

I was confused but willing to venture forth. I may have missed a critical point early on.

Had potential, but too remote and unengaging

This book with an interesting premise starts out as a kind of speculative fiction mystery about industrial espionage, and it ends up with some strange allegories about racism and sexism, and people's past and future desire to ascend. OK, that's kind of strange but could still be interesting - but I found Whitehead's writing style to be so passive and distant, everything that happened and everyone involved were really uninteresting.

A real original

This book was one of the most original things I've read in a long time.

Different Floors

"The Intuitionist" is a top notch read. It's pretty much about elevator inspectors, which one of them is black and also a woman when race was an issue back then. The different floors in the department is not a straight forward read, but more like different dreams in each floor for Lila Mae. It's really hard to explain it. The entire story feels like a metaphor for racism at the time. It's not like The Help or The Color Purple, but its more subtle. Great writing from Colson Whitehead.

Slow Start

Not enough character development at the beginning, but stick it out. Great story. Made me think about Ellison’s Invisible Man (would love to teach the two as a unit).

The Perfect Elevator to Where?

In Arabian and Muslim mythology a djinn is an intelligent spirit of lower rank than the angels, able to appear in human and animal forms with an ability to possess humans. While a genie is a spirit of Arabian folklore, traditionally depicted imprisoned within a bottle or oil lamp, and capable of granting wishes when summoned.

Subtle linguistic plays on words makes poetry out of Colson Whitehead's debut novel. The mechanisms of an elevator are genies: velocity, hoisting motor, selector, and grip shoes. "All of them energetic and fastidious, describing seamless verticality to Inspector Lila Mae in her mind's own tongue". Djinns appear later, at the end of the novel, as "dust whirling in the shafts of afternoon light", emanating from a dumb waiter. The hand elevator is primitive, yet contains all the same principles of verticality. It does not rise as high as the ill fated Number Eleven, but it also has far less to fall.

From the first description of Lila Mae Watson's hair that "parts in the middle and cups her round face like a thousand hungry fingers", it is clear that she is tightly bound in all ways. What is not entirely clear until the end of the novel is who Lila Mae should trust. Neither genies nor djinns surround her; no angels or magic lamps either. Lila Mae is caught in a web of black and white, strung with deceit held together by self-hatred and racial tension. A solipsist, which is just a fancy way of saying she's alone, Lila Mae climbs across the filaments of an imagined reality.

"White people's reality is built on what things appear to be--- that's the business of Empiricism." Lila Mae prefers to close her eyes, imagine the impossible mechanisms that allow for verticality, an ascension to somewhere better. "Intuitionism is communication. That simple. Communication with what is not-you." In her eagerness to ascend, Lila Mae forgets to make friends. "After three years she doesn't owe any favors and no one owes her any back, which was how she liked it up 'til now." Her position as the inspector of a failed elevator leaves her in a precarious spot, more so because she is the first "colored" woman in her position.

In the end Lila Mae prevails. She will be a "citizen of the city to come and the frail devices she had devoted her life to were weak and would all fall one day like Number Eleven." Her ascent is assured by the secrets of which Lila Mae is keeper. Inspite of her secret victory, however, this story makes me despair for the deep cynicism that lurks in Whitehead's beautiful words.