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Loading... The Intuitionist: A Novelby Colson Whitehead
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  delphica | Aug 7, 2009 |  I veer wildly from frank admiration to itchy irritability, but the protagonist is frankly wonderful. booksofcolor | Jul 10, 2009 | The reviews on LT are quite eloquent as to the many ways this book is so brilliant and haunting. I just want to highlight the extraordinary creation that is the heroine of the story: Lila Mae Watson. She is the first female and only the second colored (to use the evocative, retro language of the novel) elevator inspector. Lila Mae is resourceful and self-reliant, yet not infallible as a guide through this alternate New York of a different era. It is one of the pleasures of this book to spend time in her company. (  ) Queenofcups | Jun 19, 2009 | In a startlingly well-done piece, Colson Whitehead creates a real-enough reflection of America, in which we focus on a quirky discipline. The realists struggle against the intuitionists to see who will construct the perfect elevator. We find ourselves in a reality in which blacks are working against all odds to raise their lot. The elevator here takes on a thought-provoking significance - who will carry the day and ultimately decide how to construct the perfect elevator? What will be the elevator which carries the downtrodden above their current station? Whitehead takes a unique look at relations between and within races and asks us to consider from a black's perspective, the means by which race issues may be resolved. I found this to be a profound, reverberating work, stunningly conceived, and brilliantly executed. ( ) LukeS | Mar 18, 2009 | A re-read; first read in June 2002. In December 2002, I wrote: "Like other books that see the true New York, this postmodern noir thriller feels like it's set in both a science-fictional future and a dusty, rotting past. The book has a verbal style that's unmatched by anything else I read this year, but it also manages to sustain an irreducible political core. " ( ) jbushnell | Nov 18, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0385493002, Paperback)Verticality, architectural and social, is the lofty idea at the heart of Colson Whitehead's odd, sly, and ultimately irresistible first novel. The setting is an unnamed though obviously New Yorkish high-rise city, the time less convincingly future than deliciously other, as it combines 21st-century engineering feats with 19th-century pork-barrel politics and smoky working-class pubs. Elevators are the technological expression of the vertical idea, and Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female elevator inspector, is its embattled token of upward mobility.Lila Mae's good ol' boy colleagues in the Department of Elevator Inspectors are understandably jealous of the flawless record that her natural intelligence and diligence have earned, and understandably delighted when Number Eleven in the newly completed Fanny Briggs Memorial Building goes into deadly free fall just hours after Lila Mae has signed off on it, using the controversial "Intuitionist" method of ascertaining elevator safety. It is, after all, an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the Empiricists would do most anything to discredit the Intuitionist faction. Everyone on both sides assumes that Number Eleven was sabotaged and Lila Mae set up to take the fall. "So complete is Number Eleven's ruin," writes Whitehead, "that there's nothing left but the sound of the crash, rising in the shaft, a fall in opposite: a soul." Lila Mae's doom seems equally irreversible. Whitehead evokes a world so utterly involving to its own denizens that outside reality does not impinge on its perfect solipsism. We the readers are taken hostage as Lila Mae strives to exonerate herself in this urgent adventure full of government spies, underworld hit men, and seductive double agents. Behind the action, always, is the Idea. Lila Mae's quest reveals the existence of heretofore lost writings by James Fulton, father of Intuitionism, a giant of vertical thought, whose fate is mysteriously entwined with her own. If she is able to find and reveal his plan for the Black Box, the perfect, next-generation elevator, the city as it now exists will instantly be obsolescent. The social and economic implications are huge and the denouement is elegantly philosophical. Most impressive of all is the integrity of Whitehead's prose. Eschewing mere cleverness, resisting showoff word play, he somehow manages to strike a tone that's always funny, always fierce, and always entirely respectful of his characters and their world. May the god of second novels smile as broadly on him as did the god of firsts. --Joyce Thompson (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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The writing is amazingly vivid. Whitehead is so successful at crafting a very visual, tactile environment that I kept imagining how this could be presented as a graphic novel or on film (which would, naturally, defeat the purpose, but still). The experience of reading it is like borrowing Fritz Lang's eyes. If it were not so impeccably well done, it might veer a tiny, tiny bit into an excess of world-building.
Grade: A
Recommended: To readers who enjoy very writerly novels and those who like vertical transportation. It nicely combines an allegorical setting (which does create a very sharp awareness of reading while you are reading) with characters who are compelling and believably emotional (