Books and
Cooks West
January 2003
The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
The Intuitionist
by Colson Whitehead
Dawn and Jared's place
January 11 at 5:30 PM
Peanut chicken, rice, salad, white wine, cookies, fudge
Our rating: 3.75 cups of tea!
From
Amazon
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.
