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The Intuitionist

3.72 of 5 stars 3.72 · rating details · 3,046 ratings · 385 reviews

Verticality, architectural and social, is the lofty idea at the heart of Colson Whitehead's odd, sly, and ultimately irresistible first novel. The setting is an unnamed though obviously New Yorkish high-rise city, the time less convincingly future than deliciously other, as it combines 21st-century engineering feats with 19th-century pork-barrel politics and smoky working-...more Verticality, architectural and social, is the lofty idea at the heart of Colson Whitehead's odd, sly, and ultimately irresistible first novel. The setting is an unnamed though obviously New Yorkish high-rise city, the time less convincingly future than deliciously other, as it combines 21st-century engineering feats with 19th-century pork-barrel politics and smoky working-class pubs. Elevators are the technological expression of the vertical idea, and Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female elevator inspector, is its embattled token of upward mobility.

Lila Mae's good ol' boy colleagues in the Department of Elevator Inspectors are understandably jealous of the flawless record that her natural intelligence and diligence have earned, and understandably delighted when Number Eleven in the newly completed Fanny Briggs Memorial Building goes into deadly free fall just hours after Lila Mae has signed off on it, using the controversial "Intuitionist" method of ascertaining elevator safety. It is, after all, an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the Empiricists would do most anything to discredit the Intuitionist faction. Everyone on both sides assumes that Number Eleven was sabotaged and Lila Mae set up to take the fall. "So complete is Number Eleven's ruin," writes Whitehead, "that there's nothing left but the sound of the crash, rising in the shaft, a fall in opposite: a soul." Lila Mae's doom seems equally irreversible.

Whitehead evokes a world so utterly involving to its own denizens that outside reality does not impinge on its perfect solipsism. We the readers are taken hostage as Lila Mae strives to exonerate herself in this urgent adventure full of government spies, underworld hit men, and seductive double agents. Behind the action, always, is the Idea. Lila Mae's quest reveals the existence of heretofore lost writings by James Fulton, father of Intuitionism, a giant of vertical thought, whose fate is mysteriously entwined with her own. If she is able to find and reveal his plan for the Black Box, the perfect, next-generation elevator, the city as it now exists will instantly be obsolescent. The social and economic implications are huge and the denouement is elegantly philosophical. Most impressive of all is the integrity of Whitehead's prose. Eschewing mere cleverness, resisting showoff word play, he somehow manages to strike a tone that's always funny, always fierce, and always entirely respectful of his characters and their world. May the god of second novels smile as broadly on him as did the god of firsts. --Joyce Thompson

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Paperback, 255 pages

Published January 4th 2000 by Anchor (first published December 29th 1998)

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Sep 06, 2007 Maryellen Allen rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book was recommended to me off a list. I read some reviews before I dove in. Some said "it's about elevators" others said "it's all about race". Well...they're both kind of right, but I think they've missed the point.

This is an excellent book. It's an old fashioned murder mystery wrapped in a philosophical discussion wrapped in a metaphor. Colson Whitehead has created a wonderful "film noir" urban landscape completely centered around the world of elevator inspectors. This world of elevator...more

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Jun 19, 2007 Julia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

All of the typical noir elements are here - the big, industrial city, menacing boss(es) playing dirty politics, muckraking reporter, servant with a trick up his sleeve, small-town girl in the big city. But nothing, not even a single description, is cliche. The main character is principled and smart, but she's so reserved that even the reader has to make some guesses at her emotional life. The plot is unpredictable - whimsical, jarring and scary, abstract for a while, mundane.

I'm not sure the pa...more

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Dec 14, 2011 A.C. rated it 2 of 5 stars

I am reading this for a class that I am taking on black postmodern fiction. The hallmarks of the postmodern style are there. It is clear that Whitehead read a fair amount of Pynchon and Barth due to the extensive presence of half-thoughts, sentence fragments, and commentary from the narrator. So, with regards to the class, I understand why it was assigned. On a personal level, I haven't been this bored reading a book in a while. I don't particularly like any of the characters. Lila Mae is rather...more

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Feb 20, 2008 Christy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: african-american-lit-and-history, readinglist1, 20th-century-american-lit

In an interview with Salon.com following the publication of his 1999 debut novel The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead discusses the freedom he has as an African American writer of the late 20th century. He says, "decades ago, there was the protest novel, and then there was 'tell the untold story, find our unerased history.' Then there's the militant novel of insurrection from the '60s. There were two rigid camps in the '60s: the Black Arts movement, denouncing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison for b...more In an interview with Salon.com following the publication of his 1999 debut novel The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead discusses the freedom he has as an African American writer of the late 20th century. He says, "decades ago, there was the protest novel, and then there was 'tell the untold story, find our unerased history.' Then there's the militant novel of insurrection from the '60s. There were two rigid camps in the '60s: the Black Arts movement, denouncing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison for being too white, and Ralph Ellison calling the Black Arts writers too militant and narrow, not universal enough. Now I think there are a lot more of us writing and a lot more different areas we're exploring. It's not as polemicized. I'm dealing with serious race issues, but I'm not handling them in a way that people expect."

His description of the history of African American writing of the 20th century is pretty spot-on, as is his perceived position in this timeline. Whitehead does not need to be as narrow in his focus, nor does he risk so much in abandoning narrowness of focus for broadness of appeal. Simultaneously, though, his book illustrates the falseness of this very dichotomy, for he is in fact dealing with issues of prejudice, racial uplift, passing, and the glass ceiling, but he does so in a fascinating and fun story about elevator inspectors, full of political intrigue and noir-ish elements. But, as Whitehead goes on to point out in the Salon.com interview, he is far from the first black writer to attempt to break down this dichotomy. Ishmael Reed, Samuel Delany, and even Jean Toomer (in the 1920s) beat him to it. His approach is perhaps particularly appropriate to the historical, political, and intellectual climate of the late 20th century, however.

Whitehead's novel is a quintessentially postmodern tale in its combination of elements from multiple genres (science fiction, crime/detective fiction) and its varied tone and style (sometimes fun and humorous, at other times elevated and lovely, and at other times fast and adventurous); it also stands out from the postmodern pack in its explicit concern with political issues of race and gender.(less)

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Jun 22, 2007 Shepherd rated it 2 of 5 stars

This isn't just an allegory of race, as the many glowing reviews in the prefatory pages state. It's an allegory of everything. "Elevators" and "intuitionism" variously represent upward social mobility and its limits, the threatened gains of the civil rights movement, the anxiety of a post-rational worldview, challenges to good-old-boy cronyism, the enabling factor of the modern urban center and the possibility of its transcendence ... the list goes on. In the interest of thematic expansiveness,...more

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Jun 30, 2011 Dree rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011-reads, the-northeast

Maybe more like a 4.5, but this book deserves to be rounded up, not down. Fabulous writing and wordplay, fabulous creation of a fascinating world that was almost real.

This novel takes place in a past that didn't exist--where the Elevator Inspectors are revered, in a great city that has achieved verticality (and seems to be c1930 New York, or even 1950). Lila Mae Watson is the first colored woman (author's terminology) to achieve her badge as an elevator inspector--and she is in Intuitionist, wit...more

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Mar 08, 2013 Randall rated it 5 of 5 stars

I'd have to spend some time and energy to truly explain what's so genius about this book, and that assumes I'm not missing a whole bunch of it's true brilliance.

The plot summary would likely have most shaking their head, thinking, "What the fish?" It sounds absurd. In some ways, it's really absurd.

Lots of room for interpretation here, but Whitehead is clearly tackling some major social topics and doing it with humor and a perceptive eye.

If your interest isn't piqued by the thought that elevat...more

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Sep 24, 2012 Matthew rated it 2 of 5 stars

I was, sadly, underwhelmed by this book. Based on all the bookjacket praise, the trajectory of Whitehead's career, and the clever subject matter, I expected to love it. Instead, I found it plodding, and wanly written, and not nearly as smart, allegorical, insightful as it pretended to be.

I'd love for a fan of this book to explain to me what's great about it, because I really did want to like it; until then, "meh."

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Mar 08, 2011 Gpickle rated it 3 of 5 stars

In an email to a friend I said that reading this book was like eating tasty oatmeal. That is really the best I can come up with. For me eating oatmeal is work. And I like oatmeal,especially when it is tasty, I just spend a lot of time chewing it up and getting it down. And that was how this book went for me. Pretty lame as a review, I suppose, but there are many others out there that can tell you all about symbolism and pacing and craft and sentence structure and what not..

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Feb 19, 2012 Larou added it

Shelves: 2012-01, general, fiction

If asked to give a list of exciting professions, most people would likely think of things like spy, model or personal assistant to Jason Momoa or Scarlet Johansson; it seems unlikely that elevator safety inspector would make many lists, with the possible exception of the occasional elevator safety inspector who really love their job – and readers of Colson Whitehead’s debut novel The Intuitionist.[return][return]The novel’s protagonist is Lila Mae Watson, the first coloured female inspector to e...more If asked to give a list of exciting professions, most people would likely think of things like spy, model or personal assistant to Jason Momoa or Scarlet Johansson; it seems unlikely that elevator safety inspector would make many lists, with the possible exception of the occasional elevator safety inspector who really love their job – and readers of Colson Whitehead’s debut novel The Intuitionist.[return][return]The novel’s protagonist is Lila Mae Watson, the first coloured female inspector to enter the Department of Elevator Inspection, and it is her we follow in close third person perspective through most of its events (although there are occasional switches to different points of view, as well as the occasional interspersed auctorial comment – just two of the many “yes, but not quite” moments that are scattered throughout the novel on all levels), said Lita Mae Watson, then, finds out just how unpleasantly exciting her job can become when an elevator she inspected and cleared has an accident and she is set up to take the fall for it. So she goes underground in an attempt to clear her name, and, while being pursued and threatened by all kinds of unsavoury types, uncovers a network of conspiracy and corruption that extends to the highest level of power… This is of course your archetypical noir plot – except that it isn’t. Not quite, anyway.[return][return]The world The Intuitionist is set in, appears strange, yet is strangely familiar. While the city where it takes place is (as far as I can remember) never named, it is quite obviously modelled after New York. The novel draws an obvious parallel between its elevator safety inspectors and the police force, it is populated with well-worn character types like the corrupt, power-hungry politician, the ruthless mafiosi, the idealistic journalists and a protagonist that doggedly searches for the truth, no matter what the obstacles; and finally, the plot with its mixture of violence, social criticism and existential melancholy will be familiar to anyone who has ever read a noir story or watched a noir movie. Does that mean that The Intuitionist is a crime novel in flimsy disguise? Well, kind of. But not really.[return][return]At least I have yet to come across a crime novel where one of the major plot points revolves around competing schools of epistemology. The conflicts between the Empiricist and Intuitionist schools of elevator safety inspection (based – more or less – on positivism and phenomenology, respectively) seems more like a gimmick at first (and application of phenomenological philosophy to elevator safety – “separate the elevatorness from the elevator” – makes for some hilarious moments in what is otherwise a very grim novel), but as the plot progresses and Whitehead gradually unfolds all of the metaphorical and allegorical implications, it becomes clear that there is more to it than meets the eye (which in itself constitutes one of the main thematic strands of the novel).[return][return]Also, while it is never explicitely stated, there is a strong retro vibe about The Intuitionist, a pervading if implicit sense that it takes place some time during the thirties of the twentieth centure, evoked by the noirish plot, the way the characters talk and the descriptive language which adds an additional level of patina to what it depicts – tinting them not so much in the sepia tones of nostalgic romanticisation, but depicting them in the stark black and white colours of a noir movie. Which is very much not a coincidence (and neither is that the various factions in the novel are chasing after a “black box” rather than a Maltese Falcon), for as removed as the world of The Intuitionist might seem from ours in some respects, there is at least one element they both share, and that is its discrimination of coloured people, the racism that Lila Mae Watson and other characters of the novel encounter at almost every step they make. The distance Whitehead puts between his novel and its readers turns out to be a distancing effect, a Brechtian Verfremdung (and note that Brecht wrote several of his best works during the thirties) that distorts our own, all too familiar world into recognisability.[return][return]The theme of racism radiates out into all levels of The Intuitionist, literal and figurative ones, and Whitehead spins a complex web of allegory and metaphor around that center, holding it all in a fragile, trembling balance. That he holds all of it together and that it does not come crashing down is mainly due to his intelligent, precise writing that still transmits the passion that glows in its core. It’s hard to believe that this is a first novel, and I am very curious to find out where Whitehead moved on from here.(less)

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Dec 20, 2008 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars

I just finished Colson Whitehead's book "The Intuitionist", which is a hard book describe, but it is kind of like a murder mystery combined with a conspiracy theory novel about warring factions of elevator inspectors. Seriously.

Below is an excerpt from one of the theoretical debates the characters have about the meaning of elevator-ness. I thought the writing here was fascinating, partly for the content but more that the writer has so aptly captured the cadence of speech in a theory-heavy academ...more

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Jul 25, 2007 Nathan Alderman rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: detective and sci-fi fans, lovers of Ralph Ellison

This sleek, stylish, one-of-a-kind novel reads like a pulp sci-fi mystery, filtered through the searing racial consciousness of Ralph Ellison. An African-American woman in an alternate 1950s, where elevators and their inspection have bizarrely become the driving force in the national culture, must battle prejudice and bureaucracy to solve the mysterious failure of a seemingly unbreakable elevator. It's an uneasy, haunted book, beautifully written and crisply imagined, and a whole lot of fun.

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Jan 21, 2013 Matt Mustarde rated it 4 of 5 stars

I was recommended this book by my Cultural Studies teacher to read over the break, and I can definitely say I enjoyed it! At first I was a bit lost about what the theme was really supposed to be: “Elevators?” but upon getting into the book, and understanding the underlying message, I started to truly become enthralled in the world that Whitehead had envisioned.

The concept of elevators in this book proved to be a sort of filter, initially drawing a lot of my focus. I kept trying to imagine what s...more I was recommended this book by my Cultural Studies teacher to read over the break, and I can definitely say I enjoyed it! At first I was a bit lost about what the theme was really supposed to be: “Elevators?” but upon getting into the book, and understanding the underlying message, I started to truly become enthralled in the world that Whitehead had envisioned.

The concept of elevators in this book proved to be a sort of filter, initially drawing a lot of my focus. I kept trying to imagine what sort of world this was, what the time period was and where it was all set. Because of this I began to savor the minute descriptions of the setting, the technology, and the dialogue. This was the reason why it took me so long to understand the actual message of the book. It was one of those A-HA moments when you realize you’ve stumbled upon something amazing.

Maybe I’m a bit of a nerd, but I was absolutely fascinated with pseudo-steampunk/noir-esque world Whitehead created. I loved every name he came up with for the different brand elevators, and the concept that elevators are the biggest thing in industry made me smile.
I agree with many of the reviewers here who think this is a good book; Maryellen Allen does an incredible job of summarizing what made this book great. “Throughout the story Colson has woven philosophical discussions about how we know what we know couched in the elevator inspector's world of the intuitionists vs. the empiricists. The racial component plays a crucial role as well using elevators as a metaphor for racial upward mobility.”

Whitehead’s writing was clever and thought-provoking, my favorite quote being something along the lines of “It is failure that guides evolution. Perfection gives no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.”

I would seriously recommend this to anyone who enjoys the writing style of greats like Ray Bradbury and Ayn Rand, the post-modernism elements provide a good lens to examine the underlying tones of racism and industry.

Read it, then read it again because you’ll love every minute of it.

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Nov 19, 2012 Onefinemess rated it 3 of 5 stars

This wasn’t quite what I expected. Yes, I know it is somewhat strange to expected an alternate history look at the world, if everything were driven by the elevator world… but that’s what I was sold on! Kind of. Not that I was let down, just deflected a little.

I mean, the overly analytical, genre-fiction side of me (which is, admittedly, most of me) goes nuts trying to figure out how the internals of Whitehead’s world cohere. People are this obsessed with elevators, yet the Intuitionist headquart...more This wasn’t quite what I expected. Yes, I know it is somewhat strange to expected an alternate history look at the world, if everything were driven by the elevator world… but that’s what I was sold on! Kind of. Not that I was let down, just deflected a little.

I mean, the overly analytical, genre-fiction side of me (which is, admittedly, most of me) goes nuts trying to figure out how the internals of Whitehead’s world cohere. People are this obsessed with elevators, yet the Intuitionist headquarters didn’t even have a sweet-ass elevator? HUH? I wished the city/world was filled out with much more of a sense of the vertical… instead we just got an angle on our own world where people thought & talked about the vertical perhaps a little too effusively.

But, it’s not exactly about that – of course! I won’t spoil any of the curves (one of them sucked me in pretty completely – not the one you are thinking! – and taught me a little about perspective and other things I can’t put a name on)… but this was a compelling read. It zipped through it in a day or two, and generally read more than I expected I would (given that it’s straight fiction & that’s not really my “bag”, as it were) with each sitting.

The prose is vivid and entertaining. And Whitehead is smarter than me – not in that Foucault’s Pendulum asinine way, but rather in a way that just gently reminds me how much I don’t know and encourages me to know more.

Also. I didn’t like the ending. Sorry, but I don’t like open-ended stuff. I like my stories (especially mystery-types!) with more closure. I get it – this isn’t that kind of book – seriously. But… I’m just saying. I suspect that if I was reading this for a class and we were discussing everything, then the ending would make more sense and I would sense the closure that Whitehead is hinting at and leaving it up for us to intuit. But I’m not.

Anyway, it was a nice, relaxing diversion from the mindfuckery that is Malazan. Back into that today!

THREE AND A HALF STARS

Because it wasn’t quite my thing, but it was quite a thing anyway.

Also, everything may be inflected given that I may not be the book’s target audience – it ventured deeper into allegory than I’m comfortable with parsing as a reader these days.

And yes, I know I should read Ellison’s Invisible Man. It’s on my “long list”!(less)

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Jul 28, 2012 Nick rated it 5 of 5 stars

http://idearefinery.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/holiday-reading-four-reviews.html

The Intuitionist is about Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector. Though it is never named, the setting is obviously meant to be New York (or perhaps some alternate-world version of New York?), late in the 19th century. Lila Mae is an Intuitionist; she inspects elevators by riding them, and getting a sense of how well they are operating. The opposite (dominant) school is the Empiricists, who inspect...more

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Jun 18, 2012 Carl added it

The book jacket (thanks to Walter Kirn) unhelpfully plumps this ambitious novel as "The freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Hmm, I wonder, what other racial allegories can I think of since Ellison and Morrison? My answer being "None," I find myself underwhelmed by Kirn's analysis, which strikes me as being akin to "The most profound novel about a sperm whale since Moby Dick."

Hyperbolic review pushed to the side, this novel reveals its...more

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Jun 01, 2011 Brent Legault rated it 2 of 5 stars

I don't think that Whitehead trusts me, the reader, or you, the reader (if you've already read it), to figure things out on my, or your, own. He likes to have his characters tell us what they're going to do, then tell us what they're doing, and then when we are good and exhausted and ready to move on (to another book, for example), he likes to tell us what they, his characters, have done. Granted, some of the telling is told well, but the redundancy doesn't read as artistic, just sloppy.

And the...more

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Feb 14, 2011 Nyra rated it 1 of 5 stars

¿Les ha pasado alguna vez, que comienzan un libro con la esperanza creada por la sinopsis de que este sea bueno para devorarlo a toda velocidad y al final resulta ser un viaje en carreta? Tortuoso, lento y nada agradable. Bueno, este libro fue para mi, uno de esos casos. Seré cruda y totalmente sincera con esta crítica, sin ofender a otros es mi opinion personal y si alguien no esta de acuerdo o no le parece me reservo la replica. Este libro no me pareció en absoluto entretenido, fue una lectura...more ¿Les ha pasado alguna vez, que comienzan un libro con la esperanza creada por la sinopsis de que este sea bueno para devorarlo a toda velocidad y al final resulta ser un viaje en carreta? Tortuoso, lento y nada agradable. Bueno, este libro fue para mi, uno de esos casos. Seré cruda y totalmente sincera con esta crítica, sin ofender a otros es mi opinion personal y si alguien no esta de acuerdo o no le parece me reservo la replica. Este libro no me pareció en absoluto entretenido, fue una lectura que terminé a empujones (porque no me gusta dejar nada a medias siempre finalizo un libro por malo que sea),Si bien la historia tiene un inicio entretenido, ya luego tiene un despliegue de palabras incoherentes en 273 paginas mas o menos y el libro solo cuenta con 280 paginas imaginense!. La protagonista es Lila Mae Watson, quien es la primera inspectora negra del Dpto de Inspectores de Ascensores, un bloque de ascensores a su cargo tiene problemas y se desploma en caida libre, por lo cual se desata la polemica y a la negrita le echan toda la culpa, hasta alli la cosa va bien, pero durante el esclarecimiento del complot detras del "supuesto accidente", la historia no tiene sentido pareciese que la ciudad vive en base a los ascensores por lo que toda la trama esta saturada con ese tema; se cambian de escena los personajes tantas veces que no sientes ni una pisca de suspense o misterio , no sientes nocion de donde se supone que estan los personajes o que proposito tienen. Se toca durante la historia muchisimo el tema del racismo, de hecho Lila Mae es la primer mujer negra trabajando allí asi que todo gira en como son los negros, los blancos, que si uno ha hecho esto y el otro aquello y eso solo oscurece mas el animo para seguir leyendo; por lo que el desarrollo y final de la historia fue un fiasco para mi vista. En conclusion, no me gusto. NO recomendaria este libro a los buenos lectores, pero si alguien se quiere arriesgar adelante pero eso si, use un buen casco para la caida. (less)

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Sep 13, 2009 jordan rated it 5 of 5 stars

How to describe Colson Whitehead's debut novel, The Intuitionist, a parable of race relations through the lens of competing factions of elevator inspectors in a fictional pre-civil rights American city? Check the thesaurus for synonyms for audacious - bold, works, as does brash. Now a writer of no small renowned, with a catalogue of excellent works and awards to his name, one can only wonder at the venturesome spirit that led to this deep complex novel which brings nothing so much to mind as the...more How to describe Colson Whitehead's debut novel, The Intuitionist, a parable of race relations through the lens of competing factions of elevator inspectors in a fictional pre-civil rights American city? Check the thesaurus for synonyms for audacious - bold, works, as does brash. Now a writer of no small renowned, with a catalogue of excellent works and awards to his name, one can only wonder at the venturesome spirit that led to this deep complex novel which brings nothing so much to mind as the word sprawling.

The novel's protagonist, Lila Mae, is many times an outcast from her community of elevator inspectors. To begin with she's an African American. And she's a woman. And she has a perfect inspection record. And she's an "Intuitionist," a member of a school that uses an insurgent inspection philosophy based on the feel of the machine as opposed to the careful measurements taken by the majority "Empiricist" school. If perhaps she sounds perfect, quite the opposite is true, as she is not only deeply flawed, but often not quite likeable.

The plot of the work involves an elevator accident at a building Mae inspected, which she knows was no accident, and her search for the truth - which involves the war between the competing schools in the upcoming elevator inspector's guild elections, the lost plans for the next generation elevator designed by the late great design genius Fulton, and Fulton's secret which none want to see come to light. If these stakes seem not all that interesting, than know that Whitehead's novel is really a meditation on BIG themes - race, class, technology, capitalism, urbanism, the human condition. Through it all, he maintains a sly wit and thoughtful rendering of this world which is at once strange yet wholly believable.

While at less than 300 pages the Intuitionist is not a long work, it sprawls over a huge landscape of issues and character. At times one feels Whitehead struggling to hold all of the threads together, and even if he does not always succeed, the almost entirely successful attempt in this most original novel is nothing short of audacious.(less)

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Apr 19, 2009 Alan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Those who suspect a hidden mechanism behind it all

Whitehead's first novel is about a fraternal conflict between rival philosophies of elevator inspection (!), and if that doesn't make you want to pick it up, I don't know what on earth would. It's a secret history (who would've thought elevator inspectors even had factions?), one of those crypto-historical narratives that could have happened while everyone else was looking the other way. Its backdrop is a great city, never named, that nevertheless could only be New York City in the mid-20th Cent...more

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Apr 11, 2011 Brent Stansfield rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's one part The Fountainhead, one part The Invisible Man, one part pulpy gumshoe noir novel. There's a mystery and the mob and an upcoming election marred by corruption. The polemical social commentary takes over in the final chapters but it's a decent enough ending to an intriguing yarn about who controls the power to rise in the modern urban world. Where "modern" means early 1950s (I think) and "rise" literally means "go up"---because the book is about elevators, elevator companies and eleva...more

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Apr 11, 2012 Rob rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, important, to-review

I'll need to concoct a real review at some point to put it all into worth-reading words. In the meantime:

* Whitehead has a stunning command of the language (and is also one hell of a story-writer (no, not everyone is both))
* Lila Mae is one of the best, most fully realized characters I've read in a long time
* as best I can figure out, the major theme: transgression? and/or transcendence?
* an anti-example of "racism as a function of provincialism"?

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Jul 15, 2010 Trixie Fontaine rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010-consumption, i-want-more-like-these

I loved the atmosphere and tone of the book. I enjoy reading about characters who are socially isolated and/or solitary by choice. I also enjoy reading about the lives of machines especially when they're described with a touch of mysticism so The Intuitionist scored with me on that level, too. All of the characters were meaty without detracting from the protagonist, pacing or plot.

I don't know how I felt about the ending; I'm not the kind of person who criticizes books for having "unsatisfying"...more

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Jan 05, 2011 Stefani rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: funny, mystery

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Colson Whitehead's book are like heroin to me; one novel in, and I'm completely hooked and unable to function without getting my fix. Luckily book addiction doesn't work like real drug addiction, and I haven't yet sold my TV or become a prostitute to fund my habit, but I have become a relative annoyance to my local librarian with the constant renewing and such.

After reading Sag Harbor, I was so smitten with Whitehead's punchy style I wasn't sure any of his other books could live up to that stand...more Colson Whitehead's book are like heroin to me; one novel in, and I'm completely hooked and unable to function without getting my fix. Luckily book addiction doesn't work like real drug addiction, and I haven't yet sold my TV or become a prostitute to fund my habit, but I have become a relative annoyance to my local librarian with the constant renewing and such.

After reading Sag Harbor, I was so smitten with Whitehead's punchy style I wasn't sure any of his other books could live up to that standard. And The Intuitionist didn't...but it did confront much weightier themes that before, like race relations in the turn of the century, working-class culture and urban isolation.

The Intuitionist is a film-noir mystery wrapped in an instruction manuel for elevator repairmen. Sounds strange because it is, but somehow the theme of elevators stands in as a metaphor for upward mobility in a very restrictive and segregated society. Lila Mae, the main character, is a black elevator inspector in a white male-dominated industry—she becomes the heroine of the novel after one of her elevators on her inspection route is deemed to have caused a grave accident. Having a 100 percent accuracy rate, Lila Mae suspects that she has been framed and becomes a target for the mob and local politicians who want to silence her.

Amidst all this chaos, the underlying tension between two types of elevator inspectors is revealed: Intuitionists, who read the safety of elevators with their minds, and the Empiricists, who rely on research-based traditional methods to gauge elevator safety.

Lila Mae—having outsider status due to being black, a woman, and an Intuitionist—is portrayed as someone who's uncompromising in her beliefs and unwilling to bend to pressure from the outside to take the fall for her elevator. Race becomes both an inhibiting factor and an advantage when Lila Mae uses her "invisibility" as a minority in a racially segregated society to obtain insider information about the fallen elevator in a corrupt government.

So the build-up here is good—it's all good vs. evil and the oppressed become triumphant kind of theme. Unfortunately the ending was a big letdown, the belief system that Lila Mae fought so hard for ends up being a farce and the founder of intuitionism ends up sticking it to the man but also sticking it to himself when this is revealed.

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Apr 05, 2012 zxvasdf rated it 5 of 5 stars

Intuitionism and Empiricism reflects the quintessential struggles of two distinct schools of thought - the most notable that comes to mind is the classical and quantum interpretations of physics. One is old school, dependent on the physical perusal of the objects themselves, solid and true. The other is metaphysics distilled into a mystic philosophy of the true nature of elevators. Problem is... one or another, they both work.

Race relations are different today, but Whitehead writes that sometime...more

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Aug 03, 2011 Scott rated it 4 of 5 stars

Colson Whitehead's first novel which, among other honors, won the QPB New Voices/Joe Savago award (did I remember that correctly?) when it was first published in 1998. Anyway, the conceit here is clever and surprisingly exciting: the setting is a city, sort of New York, sort of in the 1950s, in which elevator inspectors are as respected, feared, fraternal, ruthless, powerful, and corrupt as the cops of a thousand hard-boiled detective novels. Whitehead sets this whole thing up beautifully, and h...more

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Feb 23, 2012 Dorothea rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I had trouble deciding what to make of this book. I think that's my fault for reading very few recently published novels that aren't genre fiction!

I had trouble reading it, too. I considered stopping, at first, but I wanted to find out what was going on. I read the last third or so quickly, but before then, as I was getting used to it, I kept pausing -- to thaw, in a way.

This is a book about a woman who has very, very good reasons for being cold. And the way the narrator describes the world she...more I had trouble deciding what to make of this book. I think that's my fault for reading very few recently published novels that aren't genre fiction!

I had trouble reading it, too. I considered stopping, at first, but I wanted to find out what was going on. I read the last third or so quickly, but before then, as I was getting used to it, I kept pausing -- to thaw, in a way.

This is a book about a woman who has very, very good reasons for being cold. And the way the narrator describes the world she lives in, who would want to think warmly of it? It's a world that magnifies the trivial, that's full of corruption and self-deception; a world in which the secure are sordid and the insecure fight one another. The narrator is not interested in pointing out the goodness or genuineness of humanity.

This is our world -- New York City (never named) when the Civil Rights Movement (referred to most obliquely) has begun to make itself felt (slightly).

The protagonist Lila Mae Watson has, through gruelling work, self-denial, and singlemindedness, managed to become the first black woman in the Department where she works. (There is also one black man there, whom she despises for his obsequiousness.) Lila Mae, we are told, is not given to self-reflection, and she is surrounded as much by unanswered questions as by chill. Is she cold because institutional and personal racism demanded it of her ambition? Or did her innate coldness simply give her an advantage? Is she a pawn or at the center of the conspiracy -- or is she involved completely by accident, then assuming her significance? Is her accuracy rate really 100%, and if not, where do her perceptions intersect with reality?

The adventures of Lila Mae are played out on the stage of an incredible invention -- the elevator industry. In the book's world, which is otherwise exactly like our own at a certain place and time, elevators are important. Lila Mae's Department is the Department of Elevator Inspection, and she is the first black female Elevator Inspector, and was the only black student at the Institute for Vertical Transport. Elevators have a history, two competing schools of thought, their own politics. They provide material for jokes and philosophical metaphor.

This entire schema is ridiculous, of course, but carefully so: it is not so ridiculous, so implausible, that it doesn't invite comparison with other institutions, obsessions, Departments, calling into question their own sincerity and worth. No reader could believe that the Department of Elevator Inspection is worth all of the intrigue that surrounds it, nor that Lila Mae has found a worthy object for her ambition; but Lila Mae makes sense, and all of the other patronizing, power-greedy, cowardly, cliquish, and/or corrupt characters are perfectly recognizable.

The Intuitionist is tightly focused on its elevator story, but its very reticence and remoteness invite thought about more expansive subjects: human contact, cities, and (the one inescapable pun) racial uplift.(less)

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Mar 29, 2011 Jennifer (aka EM) rated it 2 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jennifer (aka EM) by: Dave Russell

I'll hold off rating this one until I think about it a bit... there is a lot to like about it; but a lot I just didn't understand. My elevator sometimes doesn't go all the way to the top.

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Here's the thing: at another time and place, I would probably rate this a 4. However, in this current time and place, the complexity of the structure, an allegory that I never really "got" and the flat affect of the central character all kept me at arm's length when what I wanted, most, was to be im...more I'll hold off rating this one until I think about it a bit... there is a lot to like about it; but a lot I just didn't understand. My elevator sometimes doesn't go all the way to the top.

_____________

Here's the thing: at another time and place, I would probably rate this a 4. However, in this current time and place, the complexity of the structure, an allegory that I never really "got" and the flat affect of the central character all kept me at arm's length when what I wanted, most, was to be immersed in a story. I admire this in the same way I do an elegant five-course meal, but what I was looking for was more mac-and-cheese. The fundamental premise has an absurdity to it that I normally respond to, and there are sections of prose that truly elevated (ha) the thing to 4-star levels.

I stand by my last status update comment which is that my sense is that this was trying to be too many things at once and for me, it just didn't come together -- or rather, I didn't have the brain power and focus to bring it together. In particular, the allegory seemed to be interpretable (is that a word?) in at least four different ways. And was it supposed to be a literal portrayal - or a purely conceptual one? If the former, it's muddled. If the latter, it's too remote to involve me emotionally. If both, I just don't have the ability to manage the relationship between figure/ground that is required for the thing to work.

It's about race, yes, sure, or so we're told. I mean, that seems obvious. But it's also about all kinds of other black/white societal structures - class, religion, gender, politics. And when something can be everything, then it ends up being nothing.

And then we have this big concept thing wrapped around a noir-like "mystery" that wasn't very mysterious (not to mention, not very dramatic. I can anthropomorphize a lot of things - I've been known to cry at the IKEA commercial when the desk lamp is set out by the curb in the rain. But I couldn't get there with these "elevators.")

So between all that, and the fact that Lila Mae Watson was such a cold fish, it left me feeling a bit m'eh. Definitely required more attention than I was able to give it, so I net out at a 2.5ish.(less)

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Jul 13, 2009 Erik Evenson rated it 2 of 5 stars

There are many things to like about Colson Whitehead’s first novel, The Institutionist: the prospect of reading about elevator inspectors (a subject, I’m pretty sure, no one has ever written about in fiction), the idealogical split between institutionist and empiricist inspectors (one group inspects elevators by observation and scrutiny, the other by ‘feel’. I’ll let you guess who does what), and elevators being a metaphor for almost everything important in life—“They go up, they go down. You ju...more There are many things to like about Colson Whitehead’s first novel, The Institutionist: the prospect of reading about elevator inspectors (a subject, I’m pretty sure, no one has ever written about in fiction), the idealogical split between institutionist and empiricist inspectors (one group inspects elevators by observation and scrutiny, the other by ‘feel’. I’ll let you guess who does what), and elevators being a metaphor for almost everything important in life—“They go up, they go down. You just have to understand why they do that.” I enjoyed all of these things thoroughly. The only part I didn’t like about the book was reading it. Does this make sense? No? Ok. I suppose what I mean is that the idea of the book is really a great one and Whitehead is at his best when he is describing the heady theories and schools of thought when it comes to elevator operation. I assume all of them were his own creation and for that alone this book is worth reading.
The problem is that that’s really the only thing this book has got going for it when you actually start reading it. I’ve heard a lot of buzz about this book and was excited to read it. But now, looking back at it, I feel like there wasn’t much of a story. The climax fell flat and I didn’t feel much for the characters because I didn’t feel like they were characters, but instead representations of ideas and ideologies dressed in human skin. I found myself hastily reading through the plot to the bits about the elevators because, weirdly enough, it was the elevators, not the story, that kept my attention.
And here’s another gripe: many of the lines strained, tried to make a metaphor where there wasn’t one. An example: “He is fat and pink…In person he is too flesh, a handful of raw meat. Dogs have been known to follow him, optimistic.” That last sentence grates on me to the point that I can’t ignore it. I’ve never known a fat person’s fat to attract dogs. And one more thing that bugged me: every time a new section started, we wouldn’t get the person’s name until halfway into the passage. Now I don’t think this is bad in and of itself, but when it happened every time a section started, I found myself hoping that all this work I was doing—keeping track of everybody, going back and reading passages over once I found out who the scene was about—would pay off. Many times it didn’t and that pissed me off.
All that said, I still found myself underlining passages, excited that I will perhaps revisit them sometime when I need to know about elevator theory.
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Apr 25, 2012 Matt Chic rated it 2 of 5 stars

I thought this was just okay. Maybe. I dunno...

Whitehead's got a "lyrical" or "poetic" style of writing, which is fine --I just couldn't find the rhythm to it and that sucks.

The whole alt-reality NYC universe was pretty solid, complete with it's quirky, noir-ish, and elevator-mythology-obsessed cast of characters. Unfortunately, the narrative just got in the way of me enjoying the book more.

Sometimes there were these really long sentences, with lots of commas and parentheses. And it's not that...more

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About Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead was born in 1969, and was raised in Manhattan. After graduating from Harvard College, he started working at the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews of television, books, and music.

His first novel, The Intuitionist, concerned intrigue in the Department of Elevator Inspectors, and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and a winner of the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Awa...more

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“It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.” — 10 people liked it

“There will be no redemption because the men who run this place do not want redemption. They want to be as near to hell as they can.” — 3 people liked it

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