
The Intuitionist
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Narrated by:
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Peter Jay Fernandez
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By:
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Colson Whitehead
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Brilliant, textured, mind-bending
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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.
Great Pace and Premise
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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.
Part mystery, part philosophy, part political
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Excellent
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hmmm, unusual but interesting
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Different Floors
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Slow Start
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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.
The Perfect Elevator to Where?
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I will say it is hilarious if you love dry wit. If you like the unusual, this is for you. Who would have thought elevators were so important to the path of cities? I mean of course they are but to write a book about the love and mysticism and corruption? It's beautifully written. Almost like a poem.
The narrator has a swallowing issue. I sped up to 1.1 and barely noticed from then on. He was very good if a bit slow of pace.
Hard to carwgorize
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The book involves an elevator accident and the world of elevator inspectors (any one in a trade or specialized field will appreciate how Whitehead creates a macro culture for elevator inspector) and how different inspectors use different methods (intution vs emperical). Just this plot point alone gives readers a real interesting theme to chew on (the eternal struggle of intuition vs empericism) but suddenly an additional theme is added via plot twist (one of the only times I remember a change in theme had the same gut wallop of a cool plot twist) and the reader is left with he last hour being are a brilliant exercise in satire/social commentary.
The narration is good.
An excellent book by an exciting new writter
Fires on all cylinders; GREAT ! ! !
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