Books reviews, current events, and other musings

Colson Whitehead conjures up an innovative world in The Intuitionist, in which elevator inspectors are held in very high regard. The elevator inspector community is divided into two schools of thought: the Empiricists who utilize careful measurements and the Intuitionists who subconsciously perceive the condition of the elevator. The story centers on Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female elevator inspector, whose life is thrown into turmoil after an elevator that she had recently examined goes into free-fall.

Racial issues play a central role in the novel. The cultural milieu, which evokes the 1940's or 50's, is much more blatantly racist than the present day. The protagonist and many of the people she interacts with are black, each finding different ways to accommodate themselves to a racist society. Time, in a cover quote, praised The Intuitionist as a racial allegory. That's probably the case, but I wasn't sufficiently attuned to literary metaphors and black culture to appreciate the symbolism.

Still, the underlying story held my attention. Whitehead does an excellent job of creating his own world, which holds together by its self-consistent logic despite its unusual nature. The plot twists in unexpected directions, never heading where the reader expects.

I'd give the book a weak endorsement, which is, for me, a rather positive reaction to a literary work. Whitehead is clearly a deft wordsmith, whose artistry is unfortunately wasted on a philistine like myself. The various threads in the novel -- black vs. white, empiricism vs. intuitionism, vertical motion, accomodation vs. conflict, etc. -- never quite coalesced in my mind.