The Intuitionist: A Novel [Paperback]

Colson Whitehead (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 4, 2000

Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist wowed critics and readers everywhere and marked the debut of an important American writer. This marvellously inventive, genre-bending, noir-inflected novel, set in the curious world of elevator inspection, portrays a universe parallel to our own, where matters of morality, politics, and race reveal unexpected ironies.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

A dizzyingly-high-concept debut of genuine originality, despite its indebtedness to a specific source, ironically echoes and amusingly inverts Ralph Ellison's classic Invisible Man. In a deftly plotted mystery and quest tale that's also a teasing intellectual adventure, Whitehead traces the continuing education of Lila Mae Watson, the first black woman graduate of the Institute for Vertical Transport and thus first of her race and gender to be employed by the Department of Elevator Inspectors. In a ``famous city'' that appears to be a future New York, Lila Mae compiles a perfect safety record working as an ``Intuitionist'' inspector who, through meditation, ``senses'' the condition of the elevators she's assigned. But after an episode of ``total f reefall'' in one of ``her'' elevators leads to an elaborate investigation, Lila Mae is drawn into conflict with one of the Elevator Guild's ``Empiricists,'' those who, unlike Intuitionists, focus their attention on literal mechanical failures. Furthermore , it's an election year for the Guild, pitting Intuitionist candidate Orville Lever against crafty Empiricist Frank Chancre, who has surreptitiously enlisted the muscle of mobster Johnny Shush. Hoping to escape these distractions while proving herself inn ocent, Lila Mae goes ``underground'' and makes some dangerous discoveries about the ideas and the life of Intuitionisms founder, James Fulton, a visionary known to have been working on a ``black box'' that would revolutionize elevator construction and alt er the nature of urban life forever. Lila Mae's odyssey involves her further with such mysterious characters as Fulton's former housemaid and lover, her circumspect ``house nigger'' colleague Pompey, a charmer named Natchez, who claims he's Fulton's nephe w, and sinister Internal Affairs investigator Bart Arbogast. Whitehead skillfully orchestrates these noirish particulars together with an enormity of technical-mechanical detail and resonant meditations on social and racial issues, bringing all into a man y-leveled narrative equally effective as detective story and philosophical novel. Ralph Ellison would be proud. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 255 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; 1st Anchor Books Ed edition (January 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385493002
• ISBN-13: 978-0385493000
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 5.2 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (95 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #61,925 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels Zone One; Sag Harbor; The Intuitionist, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award; John Henry Days, which won the Young Lions Fiction Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Apex Hides the Hurt, winner of the PEN Oakland Award. He has also written a book of essays about his home town, The Colossus of New York. A recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, he lives in New York City.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Non-Stop Ride To The Top Floor February 5, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Weird, deadpan-funny, deadly serious, spooky and, in the person of its protagonist Lila Mae Watson, achingly human and real. This book dissolves the borders between several genres - speculative fiction, noir mystery, satire - in a manner I found reminiscent of the work of Jonathan Lethem. But Whitehead creates an original world here (think 1940s New York shifted slightly into a parallel universe) and illuminates it with his dazzling prose. Some magazine reviews have over-emphasized the book's racial content. Don't be misled; this book is relevant to anyone who has lived (or spent any time in!) a major city, or experienced alienation, or pondered the schism between the physical and the metaphysical. It's also a LOT of fun. I'll be waiting anxiously to see what Whitehead does next.

22 of 24 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Dazzling January 19, 2000

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

You ought not to throw the "genius" label around too much. I guess. So I'll circle around it, limiting myself to this: This is a work of exquisite originality that dazzles in every way. The language. The conception. The story. Most stunning of all, of course, is the way Whitehead has crafted an ingenious new form for a meditation on the most pressing problem of U.S. society: racism. What a deep contribution this book is. What a shame, though not at all surprising, that it is not being read by the whole country.

37 of 43 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars If this doesn't join the 21st C canon, I'll eat my fedora April 12, 2000

By Adam Greenfield

Format:Paperback

A screaming comes across the sky: a book, a snapped elevator cable...it's Colson Whitehead! How did this guy get so incredibly good, so young? His meticulously-crafted, ashy-grey midcentury metropolis looms up like something out of Hopper by way of Pynchon; the central metaphor of upward mobility - which could be so godawful mawkish - is never handled any less than deftly; the protagonist wears the weight of her overdetermination proudly, despite every conceivable undermining. I leave the details to the intrepid reader, but I've simply got to sing the praises of those stretches - where Whitehead's characters contemplate "the second elevation" that will transfigure the cities and the citizens of the day after tomorrow - whose sweep and pellucid elegance rival anything in the best science fiction for sending chills ricocheting up & down my spine. If race (understood narrowly as the black/white dichotomy) is still & always the central American dilermma, maximum kudos to Whitehead for finding a new metaphor with which to approach it. Buy it, read it, pass it on to those two or three of your friends you can always trust to really *get* stuff: this is where 21st century American Literature starts. (And they better be teaching this book as such, dammit, not ghettoize it to Ethnic Studies.)