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.

I reacted exaclty as Heather did - that somehow elevators in this world has some sort of metaphysical qualities. it would have been funnier had I assumed it was parody.

it would have been funnier had I assumed it was parody.

I don't think it is simply a parody. I think he treats the idea differently at different times. Occasionally his tone shifts and he underscores or highlights the oddity of his central conceit.

But for something to be a parody, doesn't it have to be a parody *of* something? What is Whitehead parodying?