The Intuitionist

By: Colson Whitehead

Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez

In a marvelous debut novel that has been compared to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Joseph Heller's ,i>Catch-22, Colson Whitehead has created a strangely skewed world of elevators and the people who control their ups and downs. Lila Mae Watson - the first black female inspector in the world's tallest city - has the highest performance rating of anyone in the Department of Elevator Inspectors. This upsets her superiors, because Lila is an Intuitionist: she inspects elevators simply by the feelings she gets riding in them. When a brand new elevator crashes, Lila becomes caught in the conflict between her Intuitionist methods and the beliefs of the power-holding Empiricists. Her only hope for clearing her name lies in finding the plans of an eccentric elevator genius for the "black box": a perfect elevator. A brilliant allegory for the interaction of the races, The Intuitionist is also an intriguing mystery, solidly grounded by the exceptional narration of Peter Jay Fernandez.©1999 Colson Whitehead (P)2000 Recorded Books

Brilliant, textured, mind-bending

My son and I listened to this book on a road trip after loving Underground Railroad. What a treat! Starting a third CW book today.

Great Pace and Premise

I really liked the pace of this novel, it made it easy to read in just a few sittings. That being said, I felt that at times the story moved too fast and didn’t allow certain characters to fully develop over the pages. However, the premise of the story is great as it developed. Also, the story lacked some clarity at certain parts but that could be a stylistic choice of Whitehead to let the reader do some world building based on their own analysis.
Overall it was a great book I was just expecting a more spectacular climax. I would definitely read it again and probably will in the near future to see what things I missed. The racial allegory was supreme. One of the best debut novels that I’ve read.

hmmm, unusual but interesting

I was confused but willing to venture forth. I may have missed a critical point early on.

Part mystery, part philosophy, part political

The Intuitionist is a strange book – part mystery, part philosophical musing, part political something.

The parallel that struck me in listening to it was with Brett Easton Ellis’ Glamorama. In Glamorama (another strange book), it comes to the point where everyone in the book is a model, or connected with modeling in some way or other. In The Intuitionist, the inescapable connection is with elevators. Almost every character is an elevator inspector or someone who depends directly on elevators or the elevator inspectors in some way. Even the only school mentioned is the Institute for Vertical Transport – a school whose entire curriculum is geared around inspecting and maintaining elevators.

Lila Mae Watson is the first black woman to become an elevator inspector in a famous city that has to be New York. In her time and place, there are two schools of thought regarding the best way to inspect elevators – empiricism and intuitionism. Empiricists look at the nuts and bolts and cables of elevators to see if they are properly installed and maintained. Intuitionists apparently just sense what is going on – feel the vibes, as it were – and know if something is wrong and what it is. Lila Mae is an Intuitionist, and she is never wrong.

The problem is, a new elevator in a new city building crashes – goes into freefall and is utterly destroyed – less than twenty-four hours after she has inspected it and passed it as ok. This happens in the thick of an election for the head of the elevator inspectors’ union, a contest between an empiricist candidate (the incumbent) and an intuitionist candidate. In this world, somewhat contrary to the usual practice, to be head of the union is also to be head of the municipal department of elevator inspectors. At first, it appears that the elevator has been sabotaged by the empiricists and that Lila Mae has been set up to take the fall for the failure.

There follows a long round of encounters with gangland thug types related to both sides of the struggle, and another sabotage. There are also some flashbacks to Lila Mae’s time in school at the Institute for Vertical Transport, and a lot of reflecting on the theory of elevators, especially as put forth by the hero of the Intuitionists, a certain James Fulton, and the Black Box he proposed as the perfect elevator. Lila Mae is unexpectedly drawn into an attempt to find Fulton’s missing notebooks relating to this Black Box, and in the process, she uncovers the real meaning both of the failed elevator and of the violence surrounding it, and it’s not what she, or we, thought it was.

Excellent

Solidly voiced; layered; dynamic; a new classic coming of age tale; a new classic American novel