256 pages
Published 1999
Read from February 25 to March 5
Rating: 4 out of 5
It's been a while since I've read an artsy literary novel, one with Big Ideas and Deft Prose and a pocketful of obscure but important-sounding nominations. I used to read this sort of thing a lot more back when I first got my library card, but even back then, books like this were only an occasional offering, mental roughage to counter my diet of mid-tier fantasy.
Even in the rarified strata of literary fiction, The Intuitionist is an odd one, right on the (completely arbitrary) line between important contemporary literature and allegorical fantasy. In a mid-century city that's basically New York, elevators are imbued with a nearly metaphysical dimension, enabling the literal and spiritual elevation of mankind, opening the realm of verticality and truly modernizing the city. Two rival schools of thought, Empiricism and Intuitionism, coexist uneasily within the world of elevator inspectors. Lila Mae Watson, the first Black woman elevator inspector in the city, is a devout Intuitionist, and gets swept up in what appears to be a burgeoning conflict between the two ideologies for the soul of the city's verticality. The eccentric founder of Intuitionism may, or may not, have written notes on the perfect elevator before he died. But nothing is as it appears.
Not having read much lit fic, especially in recent years, I can only say that this feels like an exemplary first novel: ambitious, lush with its prose, a bit clunky and uneven in spots. Whitehead's exploration of historic and contemporary race and racism is expert, woven intimately through the story and his satirical structure of transcendental elevation. I'm excited to read through the rest of his catalog now.
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