I'm another one who had a hard time getting through the book, but I did like the ending.

I'm wondering -- how did people feel about Lila Mae? I certainly admired her, but she holds the world at such a distance that she's a tough point-of-view character. It was almost too hard to get to know her. (I'm not saying all main characters need to be warm and fuzzy, but using someone so remote, and with such high barriers, is a difficult choice.)

here were times (e.g., when describing Lila Mae's hair or the guild's sedans) where I noticed the language more than the image

I definitely felt the same. like the choice of narrator, the language helped keep me at a distance from the story; I was left thinking, "what beautiful writing" more than having any emotional reaction.

I think the author's creation of a world different from our own worked beyond the humor. The world was familiar, yet not. This allowed the author to focus on issues in a more abstract way. I mean, if the book had been a completely realistic portrayal of the experiences of the first black female firefighter in New York in 1963 (or whatever), the historical specifics of that time and place and the specifics of a particular engine company of a particular fire department would constantly be on the reader's mind. And I'm assuming the author didn't want the historical specifics to distract from the story, the message of the book.

Pretty good literary critique as far as I can see. I loved Whitehead's world-building. It reminded me of Ben Katchor's comics which present an urban setting that's familiar and skewed at the same time, with long histories and traditions and little nooks. Same thing I felt watching the beginning of Being John Malkovich with the office located between floors with the low ceiling. This is an imaginary "New York-like" city - known yet strange.

So that was funny and intriguing. Like Anne, I think at first I was tempted to treat it all allegorically. But I don't think it maps that way at all. One of my college professors, said it's a poor sort of metaphor that can only be interpreted one way, and the more I turned it over in my mind I kept seeing the different facets of this world.

At first I was very focused on race and the split between the Empiricists and The Intuitionists. But the more he went on about the elevators I realized, Whitehead kept playing on the elevator shafts as the hollowness at the core of things.

And that one line fairly early on about "verticality having its risks" brought to mind an old black saying about the difference between racist attitudes in the south versus the north: "In the south they don't care about how close you live, as long as you don't get too high. In the north, they don't care about how high up you get, as long as you don't get too close."

Whitehead keeps exploring the metaphorical possibilities of this world he made, turning it over and over in his head and catching different facets. So I think Tom's right - it gave him a freedom to explore notions of integration and how black success is perceived (among other things) in a way that was informed by history, but not bound by it.

I also loved the combination of whimsy and deep research that went into that world building. He really grounded his world in those technical details, so it allowed him some room to treat his characters seriously. Borges or Steven Millhauser are writers who famously riff on ideas like...The Central Importance of Elevator Inspectors and write clever little short stories that are playful brain puzzles. Whitehead takes an idea like that and then really invests some energy in giving it substance and weight.

I didn't like it. I wasn't sure what the author was trying to say with the almost-but-not-quite-real-world, especially set some decades back. The Intuitionist vs Empiricist thing irritated me, because at bottom I couldn't suspend my disbelief long enough to make sense of the Intuitionist approach. Things kept turning out to be less than they were originally made out to be. The guys searching her apartment, the fake-out on whether the journo was off being tortured, the underpinnings of Intuitionism, the significance of Fulton being black (as apparently Reed et al knew after all and didn't care), the whole point of the political race, even the cause of the crash. I couldn't make out what the allegory about race was meant to be, especially since so much of the novel seemed to be explicitly about race (at a certain point in time). I wasn't sure what to get beyond 'race relations sucked before the Civil Rights movement'.

Lila Mae too I found unlikable. I didn't see Intuitionism resonating with her because she turned out to share something with Fulton, I saw it as having more to do with her being as mechanical as the elevators she inspected. (If I can make sense of it at all).

I liked the first line a lot. But ultimately the book left me dissatisfied.

I don't quite know what to make of the book. I liked how it larded its whole world's concerns into a single oddball topic, but I didn't quite succumb to the emotional pull of elevators the way I think I was supposed to. I liked the mystery of who Fulton was, and what that meant to his work, and what his work was really about, but I don't feel as if that mystery was solved at the end.

One thing I really liked was that the Fannie Brooks accident was just an accident, some random thing, and all of its significance was heaped on it by people's interpretations and agendas. That made sense to me, as a feature of how Lila Mae, and everyone else, struggles to make sense of their lives.

But I don't think I ever grasped the point of Theoretical Elevators, or of Intuitionism, so I remained mystified by the end. Anybody care to lay it out for me?

I'm wondering -- how did people feel about Lila Mae? I certainly admired her, but she holds the world at such a distance that she's a tough point-of-view character. It was almost too hard to get to know her. (I'm not saying all main characters need to be warm and fuzzy, but using someone so remote, and with such high barriers, is a difficult choice.)

I agree that Lila Mae was an odd character, but I still liked her. There really wasn't that much to her life, besides her deriving pleasure from being a skilled elevator inspector and the power that went along with her position. She really had no friends, few posessions (even the contents of her secret safe had no value to anyone but her) and up until the accident she had avoided the politics of the Department of Elevator Inspection (she owed no favors, and no one owed her any).

After the accident, when she realizes that various political forces have an interest in her, she sees her precarious position in having almost no connections to those around her. But she quickly and confidently utilizes what few connections she has (her one "friend" in the department, the mechanic who's in love with her) in a systematic way to get to the bottom of "who framed her," who's after her and what are their motiviations.

Of course, her assumptions are proven to be quite wrong, but that's another issue. (But I did find her struggle to make sense of things to be interesting.)

Anyway, I kind of related to her (which probably says more about me than anything).

But I don't think I ever grasped the point of Theoretical Elevators, or of Intuitionism, so I remained mystified by the end. Anybody care to lay it out for me?

Good question.

A quick look (because I should really do some work): Elevators are tightly linked to the idea of progress. Both in the literal sense of being a vital element in the modern city, and in the metaphoric sense of elevators raising us up. The intuitionist approach arrises from the disconnect between elevators and the people who ride them; the goal of intuitionism is to get elevators to conform to the needs of the occupants, rather than occupents adapting themselves to the restrictions imposed by the design of elevators. (That's greatly simplified)

Of course, it turns out that Fulton was really writing about his alienation from society, because he was pretending to be white. He invented Intuitionism as a joke, a trick on those who did not know what he was, but he later embraced the world view expoused by intuitionism.

Here's where my analysis starts to run out of steam--I feel the need to re-read the second half of the book.

Lila Mae too I found unlikable.

This was me, too. She just seemed so dry and removed. I was wondering if this was a function of her being the outsider (female, black, etc.) and if maybe that's why I didn't get her - because I wasn't supposed to. I liked Dagny Taggert (Atlas Shrugged) because I admired her - I guess I just didn't care about Lila Mae very much or what was happening to her because I couldn't find a way in to understand her.

Tommy, I like what you said about the elevators. It's hard for me to see an elevator as something one could intuit about, but your simplification helped clarify the Intitution/Empricism difference.

To me, Intuitionist vs Empiricist was a way to explore our relationships with our creations. The Empiricist sees the elevator, which is the way to ascend, the thing that brings a new kind of city, as purely nuts and bolts. The Intuitionist sees the elevator in terms of its relationship to people and to its essential function. Does an elevator exist, in terms of its essence, if it is not raising people up or bringing them down? Will the elevator fail if it is not fulfilling its purpose? It's the same question raised by Jubal Early in Objects in Space--Is it River's room when River isn't in it?

I liked Lila Mae, because I thought she had had to develop her emotionless, pragmatic approach to life in order to survive in a white male world. It was interesting to me that her personality seemed at odds with the nonrationality of Intuitionism. I think the author deliberately wanted to avoid making her seem like a touchy-feely psychic type. At the same time, I thought it was an interesting choice to associate blacks with the nonrational, nonscientific approach.

I wish I had taken a highlighter to the book too.

I actually, was disappointed with the ending and the last quarter or so of the book. I have too many questions I feel like I either didn't understand the answers to, or that I wasn't given answers to. What was the deal with Natchez working for Arbo? Why did he lie about Fulton being his uncle- presumably he could have just said he knew about Fulton's race.

I think I tried so many times to map opposing ideas, theories, ideologies, whathaveyou, onto the two inspection techniqes that when none of it seemed to matter, I felt let down.

I did find the relationship, or lack of between Lila Mae and Pompey to be interesting- no more than that- familiar. It reminds me of the way women treat each other sometimes. Equality through identifying with the oppressor (though that's a little harsh as far as my experience goes).

Seen from Lila Mae's point of view, Pompey was the traitor. Going along to get along, trashing her after the accident. Seen objectively- Lila Mae was no better. When she thought it was sabotage- she suspected him. Not only did the possibility of it just being a random accident occur to her, it didn't occur to her that it would have been done by anyone but Pompey and his masters.

Heather, I agree with your point about Pompey. I sort of think that the novel's most emotional moment was when Pompey rounded on her in a rage about the compromises he's made to get where he is. I could see that as an important turning point, where Lila Mae begins to see him as a person, and where she begins to shuffle off some of the more subtle stereotypes she lives with, to see through to the right answer about the Fanny Brooks building.

I did empathize, in an awkward way, with Lila Mae's emotional conservatism, her parsimonious little life. But then I got to the end and that parsimony seemed like -- like the author was saying, "Yes, withdraw, because you're safe if you have no friends", and that was kind of depressing and wrong-y. Even Natchez turned out to be false, and although his Arbo Businessman face wasn't actively hostile, he also wasn't emotionally available for Lila Mae. In the end, she was just as lonely as Fulton at his lying worst.