The whole business with the reporter bothered me the most. You have all that creepy business where he's the screaming man and the image of the fingers tacked up on a bulletin board, and then Lila Mae finds him all calm and rational, with just a broken hand, there to explain everything. Plus I never quite understood the relationship between the elevator company and the mob guys. Did the elevator company hire the mob to find the secret of the perfect elevator? Why did they let the reporter go?

Why did they let the reporter go?

This. Why is he still alive?!

I'm still not sure that the Screaming Man and the reporter are the same person, and I have no idea what the point of the Screaming Man was. He certainly never got brought up again directly, and generally speaking, when you want to scare someone into obeying you, you scare them, not make them into bleeding, gibbering idiots.

The reception reminded me of the sorts of not-cool jokes about women you still sometimes hear in bastions of maleness, like among firefighters and cops and (sometimes) the military. Yes, very familiar. (Also, the whole city-patronage, scratch-my-back thing.)

I guess what mystifies me, overall, is that I don't know what the future black box elevator is, what it looks like, what it will do. It seems like Lila Mae knows at the end, or can guess, and will be feeding it out in dribs and drabs to the elevator community over the years -- although how she'll make a living, I don't know --, but she didn't tell me what the secret is, or anyway I didn't get it.

Well, he was sort of an undercover kind of guy. I was most surprised that he had a real office and secretary and everything, though.

Perzactly!

If your undercover guy had all the trappings, and was the only black fella in the business, how could he be so anonymous?

I enjoyed wondering if the elevator industry was as significant outside the industry it's self.

It didn't bother me that we didn't know exactly what the black box elevator was going to be--it was enough for me that it was going to be grand and revolutionary and change the world. I did wonder how Lila Mae is going to make a living.

I'm pretty sure Screaming Man and the reporter are one and the same. From p. 74:

The driver says brightly, "Would you mind terribly if we asked you not to pursue your current story?"

Ben Urich manages to say, "It's done. Finished," and the man in the seat next to him breaks his finger.

This is preceeded by a section on p. 73, where Ben notices that "these men and their boss are why his expose did not run," and is followed by a section with much screaming.

I agree that the black box didn't seem to be the point of the book- but something must have been. It wasn't the Empiricist vs. Intuitionist debate. It wasn't black woman outsmarts the oppresive white guys. I have a vague idea about Lila Mae claiming power and real knowledge untainted by ideology, but it's not clicking.

I'm still not sure that the Screaming Man and the reporter are the same person, and I have no idea what the point of the Screaming Man was. He certainly never got brought up again directly, and generally speaking, when you want to scare someone into obeying you, you scare them, not make them into bleeding, gibbering idiots.

Ben isn't Screaming Man. He still has all his fingers, and Jim 'n' John worked for Arbo, not Johnny Shush (who was linked to United). But the finger thing is too close to be coincidence. I think it was a deliberate fake-out, and one which just served to piss me off.

I don't think Screaming Man was being scared. I think he was just being punished. Insofar as there was fear to go around, presumably it would be directed at whomever next got it into his head to cross the Shushster.

Re: the reporter. Why was he even there, other than to give the answers to Lila Mae at the end? The torture, overdone. Plus, the author just worked too hard to make his bad guys (Jim and John, I think?) funny. I wish that he had just cut that out altogether.

Wrod, they were very lame.

Just throwing things into the pot. Here's the original Salon review.

***************

Lila Mae Watson would prefer to be as useful and unnoticed as the elevators she inspects, and often, as a "colored" woman in a city something like 1960 New York, she is. But as the second black, and the only woman, in the Elevator Guild, an organization as powerful and as laced with corruption as the big unions of the real New York, she just doesn't fit in. To make matters worse, she's an Intuitionist — an elevator inspector who locates the defects in a machine not by examining its workings, but by closing her eyes and "communicating with the elevator on a non-material basis."

In the alternate New York of Colson Whitehead's gritty, brainy first novel, The Intuitionist, the elevator inspectors union is split into two factions. The upstart Intuitionists have their own candidate for Guild chair, and are intent on ousting the current chair, leader of the nuts-and-bolts Empiricists. When a brand-new elevator on Lila Mae's beat suddenly and inexplicably plummets 40 floors — suffering a supposedly impossible "total freefall" — Lila Mae gets dragged into the election year battle, and soon she's chasing after the lost notebooks of Intuitionism's founder, James Fulton. Rumor has it that Fulton, author of the classic text “Theoretical Elevators,” had designed the perfect elevator, then hid his blueprints just before his death. Such a device would remake the topography of the city as radically as Otis' first lift, bringing on "the second elevation" and upsetting the Guild's delicate balance of powers.

One of the vexing side effects of reading a work of fiction as fresh as the The Intuitionist is a tendency to talk influences (in this case, Ralph Ellison and Thomas Pynchon by way of Walter Mosley). But what's most winning about Whitehead's novel is the way he combines flights of imagination and absurdity (Lila Mae's gruelingly intensive studies at the Institute for Vertical Transport) with keen observation (how easily she can hide in the midst of a drunken gathering of her co-workers — she simply dons a maid's uniform and becomes invisible to them). Several scenes in The Intuitionist read like parodies, as when the child Lila Mae finds her father poring with boozy reverence over an elevator catalog in the middle of the night; her dad couldn't break the color barrier to become an inspector, but damned if his frustration doesn't become his daughter's determination to win that badge. Or when Whitehead depicts Intuitionist students discussing such philosophical matters as "the vertical imperative" and "The Dilemma of the Phantom Passenger," which asks "where the elevator is when it is not in service."

But for every laugh provoked by making the prosaic elevator the inspiration for melodramatic and high-minded musings, The Intuitionist offers passages of sardonic, unvarnished realism. Lila Mae's alienated journey through the Guild's old-school world of paunchy white men in regulation haircuts feels bruisingly convincing. And if the lofty metaphysics of Intuitionist theory sometimes wax silly, Whitehead's heroine never does. Smart, independent, lonely and proud, Lila Mae clings to Fulton's promise that "there is another world beyond this one," and to her own faith in the possibility of transcending the ugly struggle between the races. When Fulton turns out to have hidden more than just blueprints, she finds that faith profoundly challenged.

Whitehead doesn't just travel back and forth between irony and sincerity, between the naturalistic novel of race and the imaginative novel of ideas — he simply occupies all territories at the same time. The boundaries separating those categories, which usually seem insuperable, fall away, like the walls, floor and ceiling shed by the passenger in Fulton's perfect elevator as it shoots past the 50th floor and into a state of pure vertical motion. After that, as Fulton puts it, "There is only the ride." Laura Miller, Salon.com