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?

Well, they struck me as mumbo-jumbo, but then, a lot of stuff does. I sort of held it in the "don't know" category, waiting till I could get some more data. And then, the 'convoluted joke' revelation happens at the same time as the 'but he ended up being serious about it' revelation, so if I ever took it as a joke, it was only for a microsecond.

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.

Oh. This would be why I never got past page 100 of Gravity's Rainbow. I couldn't find a character about whom to give a shit. Seriously, I could probably have read the whole novel if it had been 100 pages long like that, but I was on page 100 of 700, and after a while I was just like, oh no, more annoying incomprehensibility! This would also explain why Whitehead mystifies me so.

to appropriate multiple tones with varying layers of irony.

I guess what I needed were big huge pointy arrows, saying THESE ARE MY FORBEARS. As it was, I had no baseline for what Whitehead was doing, so I had no idea where he was headed at any given moment. I mean, if I'd known what you all are describing, maybe I'd just have been annoyed with him, instead of appreciated him, but I think annoyed beats mystified hands down.

I'll agree with Billytea that Lila Mae was unlikeable not because of her game face, but because of her private face. I didn't always dislike her, but I felt like she was the poorest person of spirit I'd ever met. Sort of WTF to have that in your main character, you think?

I'd feel bad if people felt like this kind of metafiction style is some big in-joke for academics

Give that man a prize!

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?

I don't wonder why she appears blank and unlikeable -- I can see that she purposely makes herself that way to avoid being hurt (worse than she hurts herself). I didn't find her an unlikable narrator as much as aan unknowable one.

It's notable that Lila Mae is probably the first black person to attend her Institute.

The book fairly explicitly says she isn't, and the janitor's closet has been set aside for them as a room. There's no housing, and the quota seems to be one black student at a time, but she is not the first.

Also:

I do think Whitehead marks out a subtle and interesting take on race, that I haven't seen before.

How so? It seems to me that, at the level at which i read the book, the relationships are as follows: White men have power and are Bad, or at best clueless dogooders. Black men make compromises to attain power but are (mostly) Good. Black women are Good, though they may also need to make compromises. White women are invisible and/or sexual objects, which is of course a form of invisibility. All other races are also invisible. I don't see anything terribly new there, though the way Whitehead explores it is interesting.

But I am rapidly feeling as though I'm out of my depth in trying to critique this book, as it seems I completely failed to get it.

I'm not sure that not getting it was our failing though. David and hayden, without the literary critiques and other materials, do you think Whitehead's points were clear?

I think his ambitions outpaced his skills.

I'll agree with Lyra Jane that the viewpoint of the oppressed, looking at the oppressor from inside the oppressor's system of power, isn't new and groundbreaking. I am thinking of the churning rage in Tiptree's short stories (on a male/female basis). Octavia Butler wrote a devastating novel in which a modern black woman traveled back in time to be complicit in the white/black, owner/slave, male/female world of oppression from which her ancestors sprang. ( Kindred, and it's in some ways as symbolic as Whitehead's novel, but much less obfuscatory and more emotional.)

For that matter, Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes have both taken a crack at being black and inside the system that oppresses black people. (Himes notably wrote a whole series in the middle 60s about black cops in New York.)

I'm not sure what makes Lila Mae new and different? Can you explain?

David and hayden, without the literary critiques and other materials, do you think Whitehead's points were clear?

I thought the book was flawed, but I didn't have any problem getting into it. I wasn't put off by the style, or the protagonist. I don't think he succeeded on his own terms either, though. Conceptually, and at the level of the language I got into it and enjoyed it. But it was kind of cold, and the whole thing was too schematic. It's fine to work out a complex metaphor, but Whitehead had a difficult time making that work organically out of the narrative.

If you haven't read a lot of Pynchon, he does this sort of thing, but the humor is blacker, sharper, funnier, and more revelatory. Though the narrative and language in Pynchon is also more densely packed than here.

In defense of this kind of writing, it was one response to an interest in writing a novel which captures a broad swath of the culture, rather than just one person's story. There's a lot of Dickens in this kind of writing with the characters in broad strokes, and the emphasis on language, and outrageous plot turns and social critique - with less focus on subjective experience, interior voice, psychological nuance. (Also, obviously different from Dickens in many ways - colder, more cerebral, narrative more fractured than unified.)

I finished the book Saturday, and it took me almost the full month to get through it. I couldn't get into it at all. I've read through most of the comments and thought about them before posting my own.

I wonder why so many seem to think this takes place in a world where elevator inspectors are important. I thought it was more an examination of a small microcosm of people too wrapped up in their own self-importance. I would think if they were so important a) they would be dealing with building owners and executives rather than building maintenance people and b) they would be treated with more respect rather than as an annoyance to be bought off. With the exception of the college, I didn't see any outside signs of importance. It seems that Lift is little more than a trade publication that no one else in the city would seem interested in. What am I missing?

As far as Fulton's joke, I think I was more annoyed than anything. The scene when Lila Mae is in class and they are discussing the Phantom Passenger theory seemed to me to be taken directly out of my Literary Theory classes where everyone seemed to get Derrida but me, because I sat there thinking "This is a big joke. He isn't saying anything and he's going around in circles." I realize this is a feeling that generally makes me unpopular, but I felt Derrida was pulling a big joke on us. This book makes me feel like I was right. And I don't think I like that feeling. If the author is going to pull a joke on the characters, I would like to be in on it. I can't imagine readling Nabokov's Pale Fire without being in on the joke.

Beyond that, I just couldn't identify with Lila Mae. I couldn't understand someone so devoid of personality that a plastic pear is her sole attempt at decorating. Why a pear? Why not wax grapes? I felt sorry for her in her two romantic scenes. I felt sorry for her when she discovered Natchez wasn't who he pretended to be. I felt sorry for her, but I still didn't understand her. I felt sorry for her for not daring to really experience anything but instead analyzed her way through it. I didn't understand her reasons for cutting herself off so thoroughly. I can't identify with that.

Ultimately, I think Whitehead tells us this is a problematic book that demands rereading. I think that is the point of Lila Mae "learning to read" Fulton's books with her new knowledge. I don't feel enough attachment or interest to reread it. Maybe I would appreciate more upon rereading it. Maybe the problem is mine and I have become a lazy reader since leaving grad school.

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 hate to say it, but I basically agree with this assessment.

I found a good deal of this novel tiresome and obvious. Most painfully in the use of elevators as a metaphor for the ability to elevate oneself in a white patriarchal society. Which was WAY overdone btw. Did we really need a fucking minstrel show? I mean, I practically threw the book across the room when I got to that point.

Yeah, dude, I get it. Racism/sexism= BAD.

Sorry for the crankiness. I just finished last night and want those 2 hours of my life back.

But make no mistakes: the subtleties of race relations are the key point of the story.

This is exactly what made me most cranky about this book. There was NO subtlety to be had whatsoever. I knew the first time I encountered Pompey he was going to deliver that speech to Lila Mae at the end of the book to set her straight.

The fact that the book was purposely set in a time when open discrimination in society was not even frowned upon (hello, minstrel show) instead of exploring the more subtle ways racism still affects our society just left me cold. When you make everything black and white this way (pun intended - as apparently there are no other races in the universe of this novel) well, there's a whole lot missing.

Racism/sexism= BAD

I don't even think it gets as far as saying sexism is bad. It says discrimination against Lila Mae is bad, but it doesn't, e.g., show us other female wannabe elevator inspectors who are excluded because of gender. Women as a whole are weirdly absent for a book with a female main character; even with Lila Mae's parents, it's clear her father is more important.

As far as Fulton's joke, I think I was more annoyed than anything.

I just don't think it's funny. If it were at least funny when you went back to reread, I might be able to forgive it. But a twist surprise joke that isn't funny is just ... pointless.

On the sexism front, he did seem to be implying that the time period was the late 50s, early 60s. (There is a reference near the end to "that preacher down south" or similar, who I assume is MLK.) Certainly, it is an era of housewives, as far as all of the other inspectors are concerned. None of those guys were two-career families, or had ever heard of such a concept.

I suspect her sex was another tool to isolate Lila Mae, and setting the story somewhere vaguely back in time was a way of simplifying (or even not dealing with) the since-emergent subtleties of both sex and race. In some ways, Lila Mae did not always strike me as a plausible woman. Then again, I think that was because she did not always strike me as a plausible person at all, not specifically because of an authorial failing on gender.