I came to Colson Whitehead by way of zombies.Colson Whitehead, writer of award-nominated books, including National Book Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and New York Times Notable Book of the Year; contributer to the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Harper's; and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.Yes, that Colson Whitehead. Zombies. I'd like to pause for a moment and just admire the mind-twist for those that deride zombie books.The writing in Zone One (my review) was astonishing enough that I resolved to seek out more of his work. The message was bleak enough that I wasn't in a hurry about it. Though I picked up John Henry Days some time ago for a song, it was finding The Intuitionist that brought me back to him--I find a little mystery hard to resist. Except it wasn't, not really. Allegory and all that. Post-modern literature something-something. Except better, because it's not self-consciously ironic or a parody. It's sincere.On the surface, it's a pulpy noir fiction, set in a roughly parallel world to ours, ugly racism warts and all, in an unnamed New York, during perhaps the 1940s. It's about a woman who works as an elevator inspector, a member of the prominent and politically powerful Department of Elevator Inspectors. The elevator doctrine has undergone a schismatic shift in the past decade, after Mr. James Fulton developed the theory of Intuition, the discipline of inspecting an elevator by analyzing one's experience of it. Lila Mae is the first colored woman in the department, only the second colored person in the local chapter, and a disciple of Intuitionism. When a brand new elevator crashes (thankfully, without passengers), it seems she and the Intuitionists are being set up to take the fall and enable an easy political win for the Empiricists. Lila, unsure how to defend herself, takes a role in solving the issue after the head of the Intuitionists approaches her with a tempting lure--designs for Fulton's mythical black box seems to be in play but missing, a Holy Grail of elevator design that will revolutionize the city.In one sense it works. The surface plot is interesting--there are, after all, secret societies, company cars, a muck-raking newspaperman, gangsters and potential lovers. The story holds, Lila Mae is sufficiently developed beyond allegory, the city is full of rich detail, the puzzle of the elevator guild interesting and the possible blueprint alluring. Weaving through it is Lila's acknowledgement of the experience of being an African-American woman, her history, and her gradual awakening in the city. In another sense, it feels very constructed, very designed, meant to educate and explore, and not quite so much to feel. The Intuitionist is Whitehead's first published work. I was a little disappointed to not see the same level of prose that I loved in Zone One. Bleak as it was, the imagery in Zone was mesmerizing and intricate. In contrast, this is a book not necessarily of language, but of ideas. Elevators have, in essence, transformed the city, allowing it to reach new heights. A new elevator--the fabled black box--would do the same. Intuitionists are transforming the field, and people of color are transforming themselves. It's fascinating and complex, and much like an elevator--gears, weights, counterweights, artistry, and while the purpose is clear, the mechanism of the parallels are not so obvious that the reader feels overpowered. Unfortunately, it also, much like the elevator, misses the feel factor. I enjoyed it as a read, I was intellectually engaged, but it reminded me a bit of high school English class, without the note-passing (we didn't have texting in those days). Perhaps it's because Lila Mae is somewhat disenfranchised from herself--as she goes through her life one step removed, I found I remained somewhat removed as well. Still, it was interesting, and pleasantly complex. I don't regret the time spent, and feel rather pleased about exercising those mental muscles. It definitely piques my interest in the rest of the Whitehead cannon.Three and a half stars, rounding up because this author can write.Cross posted at http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/0...
There's a rich strain of American literature dealing with this nation's original sin, slavery and its residue. In fact, there's so much literature on the topic that I've heard quite a few times that there's nothing left to say. Enter Colson Whitehead's the Intuitionist, a book that manages to make the entire problem seem both familiar and alien at once.Whitehead's strategy is a brilliant one, the kind of idea that must have struck him at an odd moment, like in the dentist's chair or while listening to maudlin elevator music. The book approaches America's racial struggle through the struggles of one Lila Mae Watson, an African American elevator inspector in a timeless, nameless city that looks and feels like 1950s New York put through a scanner darkly. It's not the 1950s, though. And it's not New York either because in Lila's world elevators are treated with more cultural reverence than sports cars and politicians rise to power based on their views on elevator inspecting.Keeping up?Yes, this is one of those books where the setup sounds faintly ridiculous. It's the fact that the book works--an does it ever--that's a testament to Whitehead's genius.At it's heart, the novel might be broken down like this: 50 % hard-boiled detective novel, 30% speculative fiction, 20% literary meditation on the nature of being part of the underclass in a powerful nation. Of course, I say it might be broken down this way because this analysis doesn't really capture the essence of what is achieved. Yes, Lila must solve a mystery, and the mystery pulls the reader along nicely from intro to outro. And yes, there's some down right kooky speculation on what it would be like to live a world where elevators have the cultural importance of a beeper in the 1990s or an iPad up until a year ago (sorry ghost of Steve Jobs). There's a magazine mentioned in the book called Lift that somehow seems like a cross between Esquire and Playboy.But what really makes this work go is how the novel does what all great genre books do: it gives a world that is strikingly different from our own except for in the ways that matter. Blacks, women, immigrants, the poor, all appear in the book as they would appear down the street from wherever you're reading this post. Bigotry, misogyny, and xenophobia all trot across the stage in believable fashion.If there's one knock against the novel, it's that Lila--by design no doubt--is an introverted, cold-hearted character. The reasons for this are well supported in the book. However, just because I understand her, doesn't mean I enjoy her company. Yet, the novel is a great success because of Whitehead's unwavering eye and amazing linguistic skill.Worth reading.
What do You think about The Intuitionist (2000)?
In an interview with Salon.com following the publication of his 1999 debut novel The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead discusses the freedom he has as an African American writer of the late 20th century. He says, "decades ago, there was the protest novel, and then there was 'tell the untold story, find our unerased history.' Then there's the militant novel of insurrection from the '60s. There were two rigid camps in the '60s: the Black Arts movement, denouncing James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison for being too white, and Ralph Ellison calling the Black Arts writers too militant and narrow, not universal enough. Now I think there are a lot more of us writing and a lot more different areas we're exploring. It's not as polemicized. I'm dealing with serious race issues, but I'm not handling them in a way that people expect."His description of the history of African American writing of the 20th century is pretty spot-on, as is his perceived position in this timeline. Whitehead does not need to be as narrow in his focus, nor does he risk so much in abandoning narrowness of focus for broadness of appeal. Simultaneously, though, his book illustrates the falseness of this very dichotomy, for he is in fact dealing with issues of prejudice, racial uplift, passing, and the glass ceiling, but he does so in a fascinating and fun story about elevator inspectors, full of political intrigue and noir-ish elements. But, as Whitehead goes on to point out in the Salon.com interview, he is far from the first black writer to attempt to break down this dichotomy. Ishmael Reed, Samuel Delany, and even Jean Toomer (in the 1920s) beat him to it. His approach is perhaps particularly appropriate to the historical, political, and intellectual climate of the late 20th century, however. Whitehead's novel is a quintessentially postmodern tale in its combination of elements from multiple genres (science fiction, crime/detective fiction) and its varied tone and style (sometimes fun and humorous, at other times elevated and lovely, and at other times fast and adventurous); it also stands out from the postmodern pack in its explicit concern with political issues of race and gender.
—Christy
I’m always interested in skewed takes on genre fiction, and The Intuitionist, if nothing else offers food for thought in its noir thriller/speculative fiction hybrid. Actually it reminded me strongly of China Mieville's The City & the City— another novel set in a nameless metropolis, in which the speculative premise is an allegory which drives the boilerplate narrative. Like Mieville, Colson Whitehead is interested in liminality; except where Mieville needed to invent a near-omniscient agency to police the division of his city, Whitehead is able to recognize race and class as a more efficient perceptual filter than any semi-magical Interpol.Verticality is progress in his city on the verge of modernity, and Whitehead uses the metaphor of "uplift" to explore the splintered society that results from this so-called progress. Though there's some playfulness and whimsy around the idea of a powerful Department of Elevator Inspectors —complete with split down the middle between the "voodoo" Intuitionists and the traditional Empiricists— the main thrust of the novel is Whitehead's exploration of the stratification and doubleness of his 40's-esque metropolis.Whitehead's baroque writing does little to disguise the flatness of the characters or predictability of the noir plot, but it does lend real texture as Lila Mae traverses the city in her mission to clear her name. Raucous party rallies featuring chorus girls and humid taxi dancing clubs, swank hotels uptown and gentrifying ethnic enclaves— these settings underline the multiple city, split not by the seen (rooms, floors, buildings, neighborhoods) but the unseen: loyalty and identification, class and gender, family and race. And the most profound divider of all is the ability to perceive the unseen itself: Intuitionism.Our buildings may get higher, but with The Intuitionist, Whitehead interrogates whether progress is possible without a change in consciousness itself. Not to ignore the unseen, pretend we have created a world without its barriers, but to perceive without reinforcing its tyranny. To acknowledge so that we may rise above, to transcend. Indeed... uplift. Rating: 4 stars
—Kaion
There are many things to like about Colson Whitehead’s first novel, The Institutionist: the prospect of reading about elevator inspectors (a subject, I’m pretty sure, no one has ever written about in fiction), the idealogical split between institutionist and empiricist inspectors (one group inspects elevators by observation and scrutiny, the other by ‘feel’. I’ll let you guess who does what), and elevators being a metaphor for almost everything important in life—“They go up, they go down. You just have to understand why they do that.” I enjoyed all of these things thoroughly. The only part I didn’t like about the book was reading it. Does this make sense? No? Ok. I suppose what I mean is that the idea of the book is really a great one and Whitehead is at his best when he is describing the heady theories and schools of thought when it comes to elevator operation. I assume all of them were his own creation and for that alone this book is worth reading. tThe problem is that that’s really the only thing this book has got going for it when you actually start reading it. I’ve heard a lot of buzz about this book and was excited to read it. But now, looking back at it, I feel like there wasn’t much of a story. The climax fell flat and I didn’t feel much for the characters because I didn’t feel like they were characters, but instead representations of ideas and ideologies dressed in human skin. I found myself hastily reading through the plot to the bits about the elevators because, weirdly enough, it was the elevators, not the story, that kept my attention. tAnd here’s another gripe: many of the lines strained, tried to make a metaphor where there wasn’t one. An example: “He is fat and pink…In person he is too flesh, a handful of raw meat. Dogs have been known to follow him, optimistic.” That last sentence grates on me to the point that I can’t ignore it. I’ve never known a fat person’s fat to attract dogs. And one more thing that bugged me: every time a new section started, we wouldn’t get the person’s name until halfway into the passage. Now I don’t think this is bad in and of itself, but when it happened every time a section started, I found myself hoping that all this work I was doing—keeping track of everybody, going back and reading passages over once I found out who the scene was about—would pay off. Many times it didn’t and that pissed me off. tAll that said, I still found myself underlining passages, excited that I will perhaps revisit them sometime when I need to know about elevator theory.
—Erik Evenson
