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

Hmmm. The NY Times review hits on some of the stuff people are talking about here:

WHILE it would be misguided to reduce the elements of ''The Intuitionist'' to simple allegorical equivalents, it seems clear that Whitehead intends this notion of a ''second elevation'' to suggest, among other things, a new stage in the evolution of African-American social identity. In the quoted excerpts from Fulton's writings, the great man speaks like a prophet, dreaming a world in which every race can rise above the earthbound limitations of a corrupt status quo. Lila Mae, as the pioneer black inspector, is a harbinger of that identity, rejecting the imperatives of Empiricism and working toward a different -- and perhaps uniquely black -- way of approaching the problems of elevation. ''White people's reality,'' she decides, ''is built on what things appear to be -- that's the business of Empiricism. They judge them on how they appear when held up to the light, the wear on the carriage buckle, the stress fractures in the motor casing.'' By following Fulton's lead, Lila Mae can help usher in a new age of perception, one that emphasizes not what the eye can see -- ''the skin of things'' -- but rather what the mind can imagine.

Ultimately, I'm not sure Whitehead is in full control of the many thematic elements he has unleashed in this dense and sometimes difficult book. Toward the end, when Lila Mae discovers the missing notebooks and the verticality rhetoric ratchets up a few more notches, one can sense Whitehead's ambition straining against the seams of the pulp fiction story he's chosen to contain it. He's obviously trying to do for second-generation elevator transport what Thomas Pynchon did for alternative mail delivery in ''The Crying of Lot 49'' -- using it ironically as a metaphor for a radical new way of restructuring the accepted reality. That's a tall order, but the fact that Whitehead has succeeded as well as he has is news worth spreading. Literary reputations may not always rise and fall as predictably as elevators, but if there's any justice in the world of fiction, Colson Whitehead's should be heading toward the upper floors. - Gary Krist