You bring up an interesting point, David. Part of my discomfort with the book was that I never knew where to peg it. Was it SF, with the Intuitionism? Or was it the real world with a few quirks? Was it New York, or some other world? When was it set? Not being able to get my bearings, in this world or another, made reading the book unpleasant for me. I'm not sure if this was intended, or just the result...yet another incongruity.

I wonder if it would resonate more if I were raised as a minority, and then wonder if that statement would be offensive. Each thought as I try to bring the world into focus, into equilibrium, just seems to knock me more off balance.

Each thought as I try to bring the world into focus, into equilibrium, just seems to knock me more off balance.

Yes. this. Everytime I had an "Ah hah! This is where we're going this is the point that's being made!" I would read a little further to find that, no that wasn't the point at all.

I do like the idea of Empiricism vs. Intutitionism and verticality- and the movement of minorities forward in society. But, I feel like someone had to point that out because the pieces weren't put together. The idea wasn't fully explained (not in a "this is what I'm trying to say way" more in that ah ha moment.

David, not having read any DeLillo, and very little Pynchon, I'm not sure what I mean by your references to these authors. The Times article was a bit of a help, but could you go into more depth?

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.

As a reasonably heavy SF reader, I have to say I did take the metaphysics of elevators fairly seriously -- because the tone of the text invited me to do so. If there were more overt markers of parody, I might have caught them; but the book was so serious, its irony so cool, that I couldn't read it any other way than straight.

Speaking of tone, I don't think I can read it in the tradition of the urban muckraking pulp novel, or the roman noir. Part of it is that the language is so different; the plot elements are from a familiar library of events, but the way they are framed is unfamiliar. Most pulp I have read is direct, muscular, fast-paced and concrete, all adjectives I would not apply to Whitehead. His style is slow, and sort of shy and backhanded. I can see certain noir elements in the novel as well, but only if I go looking for them. I suppose it is the elevator setting that makes me unable to place the book's events into a real-city system of signification: it didn't feel like a city I knew. Even applying my knowledge of Manhattan onto the story, so that when Lila Mae went uptown she was heading towards Harlem, it still didn't feel like New York to me. I think that's why I have such trouble trying to relate it to traditions of city literature.

Which all leads me into wondering, what does the roman noir look like now? It's pretty firmly fixed in my mind into language from the 30s, 40s, 50s, in a way that I don't know if it would work in a contemporary context. I think I'd be more comfortable with The Intuitionist if I could find its cousins and aunts in a literary tradition, rather than feeling, as I do, sort of out in the wilderness and trying to find my way alone.

I definitely enjoyed the book, but was like Heather in simply accepting the importance of elevators to the world of the book. Perhaps because of that (and the prose style) I didn't find it funny at all.

In my case I don't know that it was a matter of expectations, since my copy is from the library and was labeled as humour. For me the writing style and the characterization of Lila Mae evoked a sort of still solemnity. My reactions to her reminded me of reading Camus' The Outsider in high school - identifying with a very detached character, and having that identification manifest as a feeling of general detachment.

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.

This is exactly what I suspect is going on here as I've read through the comments. I found the book flat-out hilarious in most parts and deeply affecting in others (y'all didn't find the part about Lila Mae's mask-face to be the single most revealing aspect of her character? I mean, every day she makes a face that just verges on causing her pain in every conceivable way, and then you wonder why she appears so blank & unlikeable to people?), and thought the only real shortcomings were the problem of Natchez's double identity (because if Lila Mae is only the second black elevator inspector, there's no high-ranking black elevator executives) and the difficulty of the straightforward metaphor between Fulton's writings and the concept of uplift, although I have to say that his writings were the funniest damn thing in the book. Seriously, did y'all who took them at face value fall out of your chair when you realized that Fulton was making a convoluted joke?

David, not having read any DeLillo, and very little Pynchon, I'm not sure what I mean by your references to these authors. The Times article was a bit of a help, but could you go into more depth?

Pynchon (and, to a lesser sense, DeLillo) is notorious for unwinking outrageous jokes, but I think the convolution of the narrative is the main point here. Pynchon (+ TALS, D) likes to reveal the narrative through memories, stories told to others, sudden shifts between narrators with an omniscient sweep across space and time, information which is obvious only in the way that it is withheld, and so forth. He's a demanding writer, and I think Whitehead is making similar demands on his readers, especially in the way that information flows among his characters.

But make no mistakes: the subtleties of race relations are the key point of the story. It's important that Pompey is the first and Lila Mae is the second, and that they hate each other. It's notable that Lila Mae is probably the first black person to attend her Institute. Her relationship with what's-his-face, the escalator guy (whose passion for the escalator is funny, dammit! He's a white liberal, see, but he is passionate about slow somewhat-vertical/somewhat-horizontal uplift? Damn, that cracks me up), is marked with mutual distrust and condescension, but it's also necessary for Lila Mae. The story doesn't necessarily take place before the Civil Rights Movement, as Billytea proposed, because Whitehead specifically rips the narrative out of real history and out of signifiers of time. It could be before or after the CRM, or there could be no CRM in this timeline.

And Fulton's writings are hilarious. They read to me like a very mean W.E.B. DuBois (or Ralph Ellison) making fun of racism in American society by using the style of Reinhold Niebuhr or another ecstatic philosopher whose name isn't coming to me right now.

Anyway, I love the book, but find it problematic in parts.

David, not having read any DeLillo, and very little Pynchon, I'm not sure what I mean by your references to these authors. The Times article was a bit of a help, but could you go into more depth?

I definitely see Whitehead in the tradition of meta-fiction writers from the early 70s, which would include Pynchon, DeLillo, Barth, Fowles, Elkin. Without getting into a lot of post-modern hoo haw, Whitehead's world seems very in keeping with those writers. It's purposefully designed to be a hall of funhouse mirrors which reflects multiple distortions at us. It maintains a presumption that there is no One Reality to reference. That our experience is fractured and that fiction should respond to that kind of discontinuity.

One of the constant writing strategies of this group is to appropriate multiple tones with varying layers of irony. Specifically, they will toy with genre conventions with pastiche or parody, reference technical language from a variety of jargons (engineering or Annual Reports or stereo manuals or racing forms etc.) Plots were often paranoic McGuffin Hunts where the paranoia was more important than the ultimate revelation.

Looking for some primers on this I ran across a study guide for John Barth's short story collection (approriately titled) Lost In The Funhouse and this study question seemed appropriate for us:

"Lost in the Funhouse" cries out for student papers of two types. First, one might want students to try a reader-response approach, to let them work out their anger against the intrusive metafictional commentary, to identify the causes of their anger, and perhaps discover reasons for Barth's choosing this device.

Here's a really good, non technical, thoughtful, brief article by Wendy Steiner that ran in the NY Times Book Review in 1999. She talks about how the canon in American contemporary fiction changed from the mid-eighties onward and she articulates some of the resentments some folks might be feeling towards Whitehead's style.

Look Who's Modern Now - Wendy Steiner

The key points of Steiner's critique:

I could no longer see why I needed to process 700-plus pages of esoteric ''in'' jokes in order to see the meaninglessness of modern experience yet again. Authorial generosity and proportion seemed much more valuable than uncompromising irony, and I yearned for fineness of touch -- beauty -- with the hunger of a starving person.

I don't think I am alone here. As a judge for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1997, I found especially revealing the debate over Don DeLillo's brilliant ''Underworld,'' which did not win the prize. The novel opens with 60 pages of as glorious prose as may be found in any recent fiction. With its waste-manager protagonist, ''Underworld'' fits in a direct line from ''The Waste Land'' (and ultimately Dickens's ''Our Mutual Friend'') to the W.A.S.T.E. communications system in Pynchon's ''Crying of Lot 49.'' It depicts an American innocence lost with the advent of the cold war and multinational capitalism. The next 800 pages of post-modern convolution reveal that that innocence can never be recovered. For many of the judges, this was a Great American Novel if ever there was one. For others, it was yet another blockbuster metafiction, excellent among its kind, but of a kind by now all too familiar.

Consider an even more recent post-modern megafiction, Salman Rushdie's ''Ground Beneath Her Feet.'' A novel full of etymological puns and literary and pop music allusions, it is nevertheless retro in every sense of the word, wisecracking with the brotherhood of Joyce and Eliot and Pynchon and requiring a lot of reading to achieve what those geniuses achieved earlier and better. How many generations of clever, verbose metafictionists do we need concocting fables of absurdity? Not only have we already heard that there's no ground beneath our feet -- the post-modern theme with a thousand faces -- but we've moved on from there. The real challenge Pynchon so eloquently bequeathed us is to find a place for interest, beauty, pleasure and value in an ungrounded world.

The last novel I added to my history was Annie Proulx's ''Shipping News,'' the story of an extremely unpromising man who becomes, by the end, something of a hero. He does so not through paroxysms of tortured irony but through humility, dumb will and fidelity to everyday responsibility. The book's language begins as boorish as its protagonist, but stays with him, ending in an inspired, marveling prose -- irony humanized into a paradoxical hope: ''Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.''

Through this lyricism and concern for individual experience, Proulx deals with existential pain, but differently from the early post-modernists. For her, the absurdity of life can be met only by the assertion of individual interest, the same lesson that Pierce Inverarity teaches Oedipa Maas from the grave in ''The Crying of Lot 49'' -- to keep the ball bouncing, ''to take on interests.'' For Proulx, however, the appropriate response is not hyperrationality, paradox and the absurd but a kind of nurturing steadfastness. She stays with the nonheroic until it is imbued with grandeur.

If the post-modern period opened with metafictional fireworks, it closes with the extraordinary commonplace of love. And this is a fine lesson for an academic to have learned through writing -- and rewriting -- a history of contemporary American fiction.

That noted...

the escalator guy (whose passion for the escalator is funny, dammit! He's a white liberal, see, but he is passionate about slow somewhat-vertical/somewhat-horizontal uplift? Damn, that cracks me up),

I have to agree this is a pretty funny summation of the Well Meaning White Person.

I'd feel bad if people felt like this kind of metafiction style is some big in-joke for academics, and that they've been excluded. I do think Whitehead marks out a subtle and interesting take on race, that I haven't seen before. Lila Mae's reactions and strategies are built on a set of presumptions that could only exist for a minority who had achieved success in our culture. All of the fault lines - the distance between Lila and the other inspectors - appeared under the narrative pressure.

One of the central concerns had a lot of resonance for me: How do you successfully function in a culture where your methods and values and priorities are so different from the dominant strain?

Seriously, did y'all who took them at face value fall out of your chair when you realized that Fulton was making a convoluted joke?

Fall out of my chair how? With laughter? No. It actually made me sad- for Lila Mae, for Fulton, for the woman who kept his journals.

I think one of the reasons I took the I/E struggle seriously- aside from it being presented to me as such- is a philosophy discussion from way back in college. It was primarily a male vs. female. reason/rational vs. emotional/intution based philosophy discussion. The male female thing is not really the point- but the rational vs. emotional. The emphasis on reason, the argument went, was at the expense of emotion which is a valid element in forming a moral and ethical code- so much so that it's pretty much hard-wired into our makeup. Because of the focus on reason in philosophy and ethics, we twist ourselves into pretzels trying to make desisions that can rightly integrate emotion be purely rational.

This was the first thing that occured to me with intutionism. If emotion and intuition are hard wired just as much as reason (which for me was mapping onto empiricism- evidence to reach a logical conclusion)- why couldn't it too be used on a man-made system?

This was the first thing that occured to me with intutionism. If emotion and intuition are hard wired just as much as reason (which for me was mapping onto empiricism- evidence to reach a logical conclusion)- why couldn't it too be used on a man-made system?

I do think this is one of Whitehead's concerns and interests in the book. Though, personally, I like empiricism when it comes to engineering - I do think that allowing it primacy in the culture demeans the emotive and intuitive aspects of our culture.

To tie it back up in a neat circle, that's exactly the critique that Wendy Steiner is making in her article. That there was (at one point) a male/female split culturally in American literature, with (mostly) male writers pushing a technically brilliant, cold, ironic, absurd fiction with (mostly) female writers writing directly out of the 19th century novelistic tradition with a greater focus on rich, metaphoric language to evoke experience, relationships, interior life.

Which sounds kind of like a backhanded swipe and that the female writers were reactionary - unless (like me) you think the notion that literary movements are progressive like technology to be a shaky assumption.