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?

From the NY Times review:

At this point, readers can be excused if they peg ''The Intuitionist'' as a parody, but Whitehead, a freelance journalist and former television columnist for The Village Voice, has lots more in mind than sending up the classic novel of big-city corruption. While he does fall back on the conventions of the genre (at one point, an overzealous reporter gets his fingers broken by thugs), he uses them mainly as narrative scaffolding for what emerges as his real project -- an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of racial struggle and the dynamics of social progress. The idea of physical elevation, of course, has obvious metaphorical significance in this context, and Whitehead makes much of it, framing his subject as a contest between warring conceptions of how best to lift people from one level of being to the next. And since any attempt to replace ''the robust edifices of the old order'' is likely to spawn a thicket of deceptions and betrayals, his use of the film noir idiom proves cunningly apt.

Full review here