Movin’ on Up

The Intuitionist a novel by Colson Whitehead.  Anchor Books. 255 pp.  $16.00.  ***1/2

It’s tough being a moron.  When I finished Harlem Shuffle, the third Colson Whitehead novel I’d read, I was so excited about his work that I wanted more, so I decided to go back to his first novel, which won a number of awards.  Its early pages were loaded with praise from all kinds of literary lights, Walter Mosley, Jonathan Lethem, and Walter Kirn, who remarked that Whitehead had come up “with the freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,” putting the man in some pretty fast company.  Susan Isaacs called it “a meditation on race and technology and imagination that is absolutely dazzling.”  Everybody at this literary party was smiling broadly and dishing out the praise.

I’m smiling, but rather more tentatively.  At least I’m trying to smile.  There’s a voice at the back of my mind that is making me feel the way I often did in high school, or maybe junior high.  Do I really belong at this party?  Did we all read the same book?  That voice is saying, I don’t get it.

I understand the basic premise.  There are some elevator inspectors (just as a group of people, wasn’t anyone else surprised by this as a subject matter?  I’m sure people inspect elevators, at least I hope they do, but it was never a vocation I aspired to, or even realized existed.  For some people, apparently, it’s the be-all and end-all of existence) who rely on scientifically checking everything, they’re called Empiricists, and there are others, the Intuitionists, who enter the elevator, make themselves one with the machine, and figure things out that way.  I don’t know about you, but I think I want an Empiricist examining my elevator.  If somebody has a hunch, that’s fine, but I’d like them to look things over rather carefully.  As in, meticulously.  It seems to me that a mix of these two qualities might be the healthiest situation, hunches and systematic examination.  We’re not dowsing for water here.  We’re taking me up an elevator shaft in a box.  I don’t want that box to fall.

Anyway, there is fierce competition between these two factions, to the point where both are vying for the lead in the drive to elect a new union boss.  There’s some Jimmy Hoffa type strong arm stuff going on, people getting their fingers broken and so forth.  The novel’s protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, is an intuitionist.  She’s also the only African American woman among the elevator inspectors (there’s one African American man).  There’s a fair amount of racism and misogyny among the inspectors, who are overwhelmingly male, whichever side they’re on.

Lila Mae had just inspected a whole set of elevators in a new building, and the next day one of them had a catastrophic accident, a free fall down the shaft to the bottom.  Fortunately, there was no one in the elevator at the time.  But her previously flawless record is suddenly in question, and among the inspectors her name is Mudd.  Was she sabotaged?  Is the animus directed against her racist, misogynist, or just a bunch of Empiricists opposing an Intuitionist?  Like many a fictional protagonist, Lila Mae is accused of a great wrong, and she—as the most intelligent person in the vicinity, who can’t really trust anyone else anyway—sets about making things right.

I had just finished Harlem Shuffle, in which there are a couple of subplots that were suspenseful almost beyond belief, so I knew Whitehead could do suspense.  But I have to say that the writing in this novel surprised me: it seemed a little fancy, not like the Colson Whitehead I’d come to know.  It was like a first novelist letting you know he had the stuff.  I feel I’ve read Whitehead’s best work, and it seemed simpler, and more direct.  So I was thrown off.

But also, this whole metaphor, which everyone else found so fresh and dazzling, I just found puzzling.  Elevator inspection?  The lifelong vocation of Lila Mae Watson?  I’m not saying I didn’t believe it.  I just found it bewildering.

There was a man, James Fulton, who is credited with founding the intuitionist wing.  He was a true eccentric, and wrote several books on the subject, all of which Lila Mae has read and pondered.  He also left behind some notebooks which apparently had something to do with creating the perfect elevator, the great Platonic elevator in the sky, so to speak.  At least that’s what I think he was writing about (I was never sure.  There’s a lot of talk about a black box).  Both sides are interested in getting their hands on these notebooks for their own reasons, and Lila Mae just wants to read them, so this man, and his notebooks, become the subject of her search.

Lila Mae is bold, smart, and utterly fearless; she’s a match for anyone in her position, a suspect (not that she’s quite a suspect) trying to prove her innocence.  She finally does that to our satisfaction, and to hers.  What the union of elevator inspectors thinks is another matter.

I enjoyed the novel, but not as much as Whitehead’s more recent books.  This isn’t where I’d start, if you’re new to him.  I’d go with The Underground Railroad or Harlem Shuffle, two very different books.  Whitehead has dazzling literary talent and a remarkable imagination; I’m most impressed with his work.  But at the end of his first novel I’m mostly just puzzled.

Elevator inspectors?  Becoming one with the machine?  Diagnosing problems intuitively?  Really?

I don’t get it.