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.

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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

Another review with some different reference points.

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Reviewed by: Rick Kleffel © 2003 There is always another world. While we live in the present, our present, we yearn for another place and time, either in the future or the past, perhaps somehow in both. Words will define a world, but they can also unfurl a world, free it from the specificities that confine it to a certain time and place. Once the world is freed from the specific, a writer's imagination of that world, a writer's definition of that world, can live in the small details that are common to all worlds. Those small details can evoke the currents of power and privilege that move all men and women. Colson Whitehead creates a confined world of elevator inspectors in an unnamed city that is surely New York, then frees the world with the experience of 'The Intuitionist', the first black woman to join their ranks. Lila Mae Watson is complex, memorable, often frustrating. But she's never wrong.

Two warring factions exist within the Department of Elevator Inspectors. The Empiricists are rational, by-the-book inspectors, who carefully check each gear, pulley and brake to ensure that vertical travel is safe in the city. Intuitionists simply step in an elevator and know if something is wrong. Lila Mae is the most accurate of the latter faction, but it's an elevator that she inspected that goes into free-fall, embarrassing and potentially endangering the mayor. Pursued by both factions, this careful, almost prissy woman goes off the rails in a very controlled manner to find out who sabotaged the elevator and why. It must be sabotage because Lila Mae is never wrong.

Whitehead has a complex agenda with this first novel. He never names the city in which it takes place, but gives enough evidence for the reader to know that it's New York. This deliberate anonymity gives the novel a sort of surreal feeling, as does the indeterminate time setting. Whitehead writes passionately and often disturbingly about racism, and the prices paid by those who must first pioneer the entry into a new social milieu, be it a social or professional group. He's also very funny, with the sort of savage, underplayed humor that one finds in the work of Franz Kafka. In one segment, he speaks of an elevator company that has learned to use "the dark power of the bikini" to sell its products.

Whitehead infuses his novel with elements of the fantastic, from the sense of anonymity to the powers of Lila Mae's intuition. Whitehead's description of her ability to read an elevator is straight out of Philip K. Dick or Stephen King, but Whitehead grounds it in the minutia of elevator technology. This technology plays a big part in 'The Intuitionist'. Whitehead details the apocrypha and legends of a profession so small one would think them to barely exist, and yet he finds a world of information and humanity within. His fascination with documentation and lost papers is reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges and Stanislaw Lem. As an Intuitionist, Lila is the heir to the work and papers of one James Fulton, who founded the guild of Intuitionists. She's also the pawn of their current leaders, and the leaders of the Empiricists, who are working hand-in-hand with the mob to control the elevator business in the city. Though she's an Intuitionist, she finds herself seeking an ephemeral, empirical truth that lies outside the documentation, outside the guilds, outside the department, outside the world as she knows it.

To tell his story, Whitehead jumps about with complete abandon, which may confuse some readers. The novel often reads like a patchwork journal, with bits of news coverage pasted in amidst the very personal recollections of its heroine. Lila Mae herself is complex and confused, shuttling back and forth between memories and the present, between the truths she must face and the lies she must tell herself to keep going. Some readers will respond to this with great enthusiasm, while others will merely scratch their heads. Whitehead's meta-fictional forays were for this reader some of the most entertaining passages of the book, and his convoluted style serves them well, though it detracts from the narrative drive.

Whitehead has a fascinating story of perception and race, of groups and the individual to spin out in 'The Intuitionist'. Beliefs based on documentation, on perception, on writing and on tradition are de-constructed as easily as those based on emotion and opinion. Whitehead's observations about race are low key but fueled by the kind of rage that shelves Kafka's writing under humor. Whitehead's sense of humor is an under-cutting sense of unreality, where jokes become reality and reality is clearly a joke. The most distressing, horrific scene in the novel is a humor routine played out for the starched white audience of elevator inspectors.

Whitehead's novel is neither fish nor fowl. While it has strong echoes of genre fiction, it is clearly not genre fiction, and might alienate a fair proportion of the genre-fiction audience with its convoluted plot and chronology. But it's also a little too funny and too surreal to sit comfortably with the strictly literary readers. His humor is very straight-laced, so much so that many will think he's being serious when he's at his most outrageous. Whitehead is writing unclassifiable literature that's truly original. 'The Intuitionist', poignant and pointed, is literature from another time, from another world, a world that may never exist or have existed. One of the reasons that there are always other worlds is that writers such as Whitehead are able to conjure them from words alone.

Some interesting links on The Intuitionist - including Dale Peck's notoriously cranky bad review of it.

In fact Whitehead's ambitions are so vast they seem to have snowed readers into confusing intended with actual product. The Intuitionist is a stiff, schematic novel whose most far-reaching passages—the stuff about theoretical elevators, the faux-noir torture bits—fall flattest; in particular, the novel's protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, is weirdly emotionless, simultaneously three-dimensional and without substance, like a figure half-materialized on the transporter deck of the Enterprise.

The Salon interview available through that link is pretty interesting and straightforward.

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When did you decide that you wanted to be a novelist?

When I was a kid. I read Stephen King and I thought he was really cool. I wanted to write novels with monsters in them. It was kind of funny, this year, to see the rediscovery of Stephen King.

Where did the idea for the elevator inspector in the "The Intuitionist" come from?

My whole life I've seen those elevator inspection certificates. I'd go to school, when I was a kid, and come back and the person had been there, the exact same guy for 10 years. The elevator seemed perfectly fine, so what'd he do? I was thinking about what would make a funny detective story. Well, why not put this person in a situation where he actually has to apply his esoteric skills to a straightforward mystery? But then I had to actually make up what kinds of skills he had, and it became all about elevators and not so much this chase-the-McGuffin sort of story.

And where did the idea of Empiricism vs. Intuitionism come from?

I had a book called "The Evolution of Useful Things." I looked through the index, didn't see "Elevator." [Author Henry Petroski] did have a chapter on how inventors come to create improvements on various objects. Like, why does a fork have four tines instead of five? It was so over-the-top -- it was well-written, but impractical. He wrote, "Our objects are weak, they drink like fishes, they cuss like sailors, you have to keep control of them."

He was personifying them.

Yeah. And so, from that, it became this absurd doctrine of how we can treat elevators, how we can tend to them and nurse them.

I'm assuming that you always meant your main character to be black. Did you always mean her to be a woman, too?

No. I had the bare bones of the plot, and I was starting to get the voice of the book down, and it was just coming out the same, like my stock ironic black man character I've always used.

What are the characteristics of your stock ironic black character?

He's hard to describe, but I guess he can be kind of tedious at times.

Is he wisecracking?

Yeah, sort of wisecracking -- he knows what's going on. I guess the book would have been perfectly fine with him in it, but I was doing the same old thing, so I thought, "Let's just switch it up." Of course, that changed the entire book. I had to throw out a lot of the plot I had before, and it became a lot more ... it was harder but it became more interesting. I was struggling through the first chapter, and when she takes that bribe in the beginning, I was "OK, this is who she is."

The building super puts the money in her pocket, and she just ignores the fact that he's done it. She still gives him the citation, but she doesn't say, "No, take that back!" or "How dare you?" How did that form your sense of who she was?

She is incorruptible, but she has her own set of rules. She's not giving back the bribe, and she's not doing what she's supposed to do in that situation. She's in this middle ground. For me that fed into her responses later on, with the intrigues with the Empiricists and the Intuitionists.

You're using elements of a style that people associate with white men -- the Thomas Pynchons and Don DeLillos of this world. People who don't like that kind of book tend to dismiss them for being white men. By writing these big novels that make big statements about society they're supposedly showing a bogus sense of entitlement.

I love all those guys. And I certainly don't feel that way. I think they're great writers and I think they're attacking, grappling with, the culture in a way that interests me. I think if it's a good book, it's a good book.

You are in this literary territory that isn't usually associated with black writers, though.

I think Ishmael Reed has done it -- "Mumbo Jumbo" and "Flight to Canada" are in the same sort of vein, I think he's overlooked as a groundbreaking voice in black fiction. And Jean Toomer's "Cane," a '20s novel. He's a Harlem Renaissance guy. I think it's always been there, it's just that mainstream critics, maybe even readers, don't see the linkages.

In fact Whitehead's ambitions are so vast they seem to have snowed readers into confusing intended with actual product. The Intuitionist is a stiff, schematic novel whose most far-reaching passages—the stuff about theoretical elevators, the faux-noir torture bits—fall flattest; in particular, the novel's protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, is weirdly emotionless, simultaneously three-dimensional and without substance, like a figure half-materialized on the transporter deck of the Enterprise.

I think the first sentence pretty much captures my reaction- I think what bugs me is that I can see the ambition, but it's not fulfilled. I do think it tries to speak to trancending race (though I never got that Lila Mae had faith that it could be trancended. She seemed to think that trancendance wasn't possible, merely tolerance and grudging acceptance). I also didn't see much of the humor or "parodies" the reviewers cite.

I also didn't see much of the humor or "parodies" the reviewers cite.

You didn't think it was inherently funny to ascribe metaphysics to elevator inspection?

No. I just accepted it as something that was possible in the world I was being told about.

No. I just accepted it as something that was possible in the world I was being told about.

That brings up an interesting idea that occurred to me as I was browsing through the reviews. The reviewers who saw The Intuitionist as a science fiction novel (in the tradition of Lem or Dick) saw it/read it differently than those read it as following Pynchon or Delillo.

It reminded me of something I recall from a writing class where the teacher pointed out that genre expectations will affect how readers approach figurative language. I think he used an example like, "As he sat on the plane, he watched the long snake carrying the baggage onto the tarmac." He said science fiction readers would tend to read that literally because...maybe it's a big snake. Whereas without that expectation, the reader would presume there's a metaphor in there.

For myself, the book starts with a sort of "What if Melville wrote a book about elevator inspectors instead of whaling?" - which is just funnier to me in its juxtaposition of lofty and mundane. Not that I think Whitehead is simply joking at the notion - obviously he spent a lot of energy researching elevators to make it credible.

addendum to note, I'm not making a presumption about how Heather read the book, or whether she has any genre expectations. Just that what she said sparked that notion.

I just accepted it as something that was possible in the world I was being told about.

Same here. I mean, a lot of things sound pretty wacky to me that exist in the real world, that aren't considered funny by their practicioners. Multiply that by a factor of five million for SF.