Book Review: Colson Whitehead The Intuitionist

It has a been a long time since the synopsis of a book got me as excited as the one for The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead.  Here is one synopsis, which is a medley I put together from several found on Wikipedia, Amazon and Goodreads:

The Intuitionist takes place in a North American city full of skyscrapers prior the Civil Rights movement, in which black people referred to as "colored" and integration a current topic of discussion. Lila Mae Watson, the second black elevator inspector and the first black female inspector in the city, belongs to the "Intuitionist" school who practice an inspecting method by which they ride in an elevator and intuit the state of the elevator and its related systems. The competing school, the "Empiricists", insists upon traditional instrument-based verification of the condition of the elevator.

When the Number Eleven elevator of the newly completed Fanny Briggs Memorial Building goes into deadly free-fall just hours after Lila Mae has signed off on it, the Intuitionists suspect the Empiricists of a set-up, motivated by an upcoming election in the Elevator Inspectors Guild. With the help of the Intuitionist faction, Lila Mae strives to exonerate herself while avoiding underworld hit men and the Guild's internal affairs department. All the while, she also wrestles with the mystery surrounding the existence of heretofore lost writings by James Fulton, the father of Intuitionism, whose own history is itself a mystery.

Sounds pretty amazing, right? I was expecting a book length discussion of the relative merits of deductive and inductive reasoning wrapped up in a noir detective thriller. Turns out, that is not what this book is about. There are elements of a noir detective thriller, but the Intuitionist vs. Empiricist debate is a smokescreen; just labels for the two sides involved in a proxy war on behalf of two elevator companies. The motivating forces are not intellectual at all; corporate greed and racism drive the most of the secondary characters in the book. Indeed, Whitehead seems to be poking fun at academia and the intellectual games academics play, when he shows us the tremendous intellectual effort devoted to Intuitionism and then tells us that Fulton invented it as a joke. Similarly, when Whitehead reveals what Fulton meant by his marginalia "Lila Mae is the one".

About two-thirds of the way through the book, when I realized I was sold a false bill of goods, I put the book down. It took me some time to let go of what I thought the book was about in order to enjoy the book as it actually was: an exploration of race and social mobility expressed through the metaphor of ascending on an elevator. This book isn't the best I have read that tries to tackle these issues, but it is an interesting one that is further elevated by prose that is at times stunningly beautiful. The depiction of race relations, and the general atmosphere of racism, is striking, while Lila Mae's character is well realized (she appears to lie somewhere pretty far along the spectrum).

Some assorted additional thoughts:

1. Is this book science fiction or fantasy? This book was chosen by the classic science fiction reading group that I belong to. It does have some urban fantasy elements, but it is not what you would typically call science fiction. However, it does share with a lot of the best science fiction a desire to use a technological metaphor to explore important social issues. Some people at the book club emphasized the comic book elements with Intuitionism being a super-power; this connection is strengthened by Whitehead's decision to name the journalist character Ben Urich, a journalist from the Marvel universe (the book clubbers identified an early scene where Urich is tortured as a direct echo of Frank Miller's "Born Again" Daredevil arc).
2. Everybody seems to think that story is set in a version of New York city. Except perhaps me. I envision it in Chicago given that Lila Mae makes a short car trip to the Midwest Institute for Vertical Transport. I think this is also fitting given Chicago's history of skyscapers. 
3. A lot of commentators state that this is the only novel set in the world of elevator inspectors. Note true! Or at least, not precisely true. Friendly Fire by A. B. Yehoshua is about an elevator engineer. From a review on Amazon:

   Ya'ari, who runs a Tel Aviv engineering company, needs to be in control, and his inability to control the vagaries of nature (and other people) frustrates him. In an unforgettably described passage at the outset of the novel, Ya'ari has been summoned to correct the unbearable moaning noises which emanate from an elevator whenever the wind blows, an engineering problem that Yehoshua actually manages to make exciting.

All in all, although the book turned out to be very different than what I had imagined, I thought there was enough in it to make it worth reading. Whitehead has a gift for writing and I will seek out his work in future. On my rating scale, that makes it a "good" ...

R⁴ Rating: 7 out of 10.