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Summary
Summary
It is a time of calamity in a major metropolitan city's Department of Elevator Inspectors, and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector in the history of the department, is at the center of it. There are two warring factions within the department: the Empiricists, who work by the book and dutifully check for striations on the winch cable and such; and the Intuitionists, who are simply able to enter the elevator cab in question, meditate, and intuit any defects. Lila Mae is an Intuitionist and, it just so happens, has the highest accuracy rate in the entire department. But when an elevator in a new city building goes into total freefall on Lila Mae's watch, chaos ensues. It's an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the good-old-boy Empiricists would love nothing more than to assign the blame to an Intuitionist. But Lila Mae is never wrong. The sudden appearance of excerpts from the lost notebooks of Intuitionism's founder, James Fulton, has also caused quite a stir. The notebooks describe Fulton's work on the "black box," a perfect elevator that could reinvent the city as radically as the first passenger elevator did when patented by Elisha Otis in the nineteenth century. When Lila Mae goes underground to investigate the crash, she becomes involved in the search for the portions of the notebooks that are still missing and uncovers a secret that will change her life forever. A dead-serious and seriously funny feat of the imagination,The Intuitionistis a brilliant debut by an exceptional young talent. Its sidesplitting humor is accompanied by a sobering examination of race--how it causes people to act and what it causes them to believe about themselves and others. In the tradition of Ralph Ellison, Colson Whitehead artfully crosses back and forth over racial, political, and artistic borders to create a work of stunning depth, soulfulness, and originality, starring one of the most intriguing heroines in contemporary fiction.
Author Notes
Colson Whitehead was born on November 6, 1969. He graduated from Harvard College and worked at the Village Voice writing reviews of television, books, and music.
His first novel, The Intuitionist, won the Quality Paperback Book Club's New Voices Award. His other books include The Colossus of New York, Sag Harbor, and Zone One. He won the Young Lions Fiction Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for John Henry Days, the PEN/Oakland Award for Apex Hides the Hurt, and the National Book Award for fiction and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Underground Railroad.
His reviews, essays, and fiction have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Harper's and Granta. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
A dizzyingly-high-concept debut of genuine originality, despite its indebtedness to a specific source, ironically echoes and amusingly inverts Ralph Ellison's classic Invisible Man. In a deftly plotted mystery and quest tale that's also a teasing intellectual adventure, Whitehead traces the continuing education of Lila Mae Watson, the first black woman graduate of the Institute for Vertical Transport and thus first of her race and gender to be employed by the Department of Elevator Inspectors. In a ""famous city"" that appears to be a future New York, Lila Mae compiles a perfect safety record working as an ""lntuitionist"" inspector who, through meditation,. ""senses"" the condition of the elevators she's assigned. But after an episode of ""total freefall"" in one of ""her"" elevators leads to an elaborate investigation, Lila Mae is drawn into conflict with one of the Elevator Guild's ""Empiricists,"" those who, unlike Intuitionists, focus their attention on literal mechanical failures. Furthermore, it's an election year for the Guild, pitting lntuitionist candidate Orville Lever against crafty Empiricist Frank Chancre, who has surreptitiously enlisted the muscle of mobster Johnny Shush. Hoping to escape these distractions while proving herself innocent, Lila Mae goes ""underground"" and makes some dangerous discoveries about the ideas and the life of Intuitionism's founder, James Fulton, a visionary known to have been working on a ""black box"" that would revolutionize elevator construction and after the nature of urban life forever. Lila Mae's odyssey involves her further with such mysterious characters as Fulton's former housemaid and lover, her circumspect ""house nigger"" colleague Pompey, a charmer named Natchez, who claims he's Fulton's nephew, and sinister Internal Affairs investigator Bart Arbogast. Whitehead skillfully orchestrates these noirish particulars together with an enormity of technical-mechanical detail and resonant meditations on social and racial issues, bringing all into a many-leveled narrative equally effective as detective story and philosophical novel. Ralph Ellison would be proud. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Whitehead's debut novel can claim a literary lineage that includes Orwell, Ellison, Vonnegut, and Pynchon, yet it is resoundingly original. Set in a New York-like metropolis, it tells the tale of Lila Mae Watson, the first black woman elevator inspector. Now this may not sound impressive, but in the tricky universe Whitehead has constructed, elevators are mystical vehicles and the inspectors a priestly lot. But all is not peaceful in the cult of verticality: there is a war going on between two factions, the Empiricists, who work purely on the physical plane, and the Intuitionists, who inspect by sensing, or intuiting, the state of each machine. Watson is an Intuitionist whose faith is shaken to the core by a freak accident that not only jeopardizes her career but, as her attempt to clear her name draws her into a web of intrigue surrounding the enigmatic founder of her sect, puts her very life in danger. The story is mesmerizing, but it is Whitehead's shrewd and sardonic humor and agile explications of the insidiousness of racism and the eternal conflict between the material and the spiritual that make this such a trenchant and accomplished novel. (Reviewed December 1, 1998)0385492995Donna Seaman