The Intuitionist

Rating:
Summary: Still a 1st novel, dudes and dudets
Review: This isn't to say many parts of the book ain't authorish, for the

admixture of past and present-day narrative doesn't go nearly as

smoothly as say "Mothsmoke". Lila Mae Watson was an obvious

stab at spoofing the noir cliche of the icy, all-buisness pro, but in

summary is unempathetically limp, and Whitehead's fantasy world,

however evocatively crafted, is so outlandish as to often be inanely

curious rather than stirring.




Nevertheless, his command of language is stellar and voca-

bulary intense, and always deftly utilized, hiliarity is abundant(the

encounter with Pie Faced Annie comes to mind), and someone gi-

ve credit for all that immense technical detail!

Rating:
Summary: If this doesn't join the 21st cent canon, I'll eat my fedora
Review: A screaming comes across the sky: a book, a snapped elevator cable...it's Colson Whitehead! How did this guy get so incredibly good, so young? His meticulously-crafted, ashy-grey midcentury metropolis looms up like something out of Hopper by way of Pynchon; the central metaphor of upward mobility - which could be so godawful mawkish - is never handled any less than deftly; the protagonist wears the weight of her overdetermination proudly, despite every conceivable undermining. I leave the details to the intrepid reader, but I've simply got to sing the praises of those stretches - where Whitehead's characters contemplate "the second elevation" that will transfigure the cities and the citizens of the day after tomorrow - whose sweep and pellucid elegance rival anything in the best science fiction for sending chills ricocheting up & down my spine. If race (understood narrowly as the black/white dichotomy) is still & always the central American dilermma, maximum kudos to Whitehead for finding a new metaphor with which to approach it. Buy it, read it, pass it on to those two or three of your friends you can always trust to really *get* stuff: this is where 21st century American Literature starts. (And they better be teaching this book as such, dammit, not ghettoize it to Ethic Studies.)

Rating:
Summary: This was not a labor of Love
Review: As my subject states, _The Intuitionist_ by Whitehead is a passable novel.

On the surface, the plot deals with the possible sabotage of an elevator seen by the general public as a symbol of Black progression. On a much deeper level, it is an allegory of race relations in the United States.

It is, however, quite a long book, much longer than is expected after having read it. Little major happens until the last 50 pages of the novel, creating a long and tedious read. Few scenes are memorable, and the speech is uninteresting. The characters are dull and monotonous.

Actually, Whitehead came to teach a lecture at my university, Rochester Institute of Technology, this fall (2002). He is a much more interesting individual than the book seems to imply.

All in all, the book is, to sum it up, boring. It lacks substance, suspense, and involvement. Very passable. Very.

Rating:
Summary: "When you get to the bottom, you go back to the top..."
Review: I had a hard time figuring out what I thought of this book. Its hard to get into at first and then proceeds to excellerate and decellerate wildly. Parts of the narrative were interesting-- mostly the section that directly address the issue of race through flashbacks. The main character, Lila Mae Watson is someone you can root for but she gets lost in what disintegrates into a unfulfilling "whodunit?" ( Think pulpy fiction.)

In general, the book does not flow well. It felt like the author diliberately set out to challenge the reader rather than write a story; and it shows. There are some interesting but unecc. confusing change of narratives. Ultimately, the book is not memorably.

Rating:
Summary: New Voice That I Hope To See A Lot More From
Review: I think Colson Whitehead is a dynamic new voice in American fiction. He certainly breaks into new territory for an African-American writer, and The Intuitionist definately earns comparison to Thomas Pynchon and Joseph Heller. The novel is part mystery, part racial allegory, and its set in sort of a strange, slightly skewed world which is almost like ours, but not quite. He sort of tweeks your perceptions throughout, building this entire culture of elevator inspectors and racial politics that seems completely real, but isn't. At least I think it isn't.

I was in an elevator the other day and, after a moment of shared confusion with the elevator buttons, I found myself about to bring the novel up to my unsuspecting fellow passengers. I didn't, but I figure when a novel gets into my head that way then the writer must be doing something right. I look forward to Whitehead's next project. He's young, and I wish him a long career.

Rating:
Summary: An Interesting Experiment into Genre-Crossing
Review: I thought this was a good book mainly for its scope and ambition. The author created a remarkable world and the rendering of that world in all its minutiae was my favorite aspect of the novel. However, the book did run into platitude city at times, which I think is attributable to the confines of the detective novel form. There are also very typical characters that you would expect in a crime story in here and they even talk like the staple 1930's gansters. I only wished the author had not relied so much on the conventions of the crime/detective genre and instead tried to get a little more creative with what could have been done with the plot. But this is a great first novel that had many passages of dazzling prose that really demonstrated the author's love of language. It's detective meets sci-fi and it's an interesting and ambitious experiment but it probably isn't for everyone.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent debut
Review: I'm glad to see some laudatory four-star reviews here. Too many folks resort to five stars to make writing a review worth their while, and seem to regard three stars as an indication of failure by an author when it ought to signal a good, readable effort. I award The Intuitionist four stars for a fine first novel with a controlled voice and interesting approach. Whitehead manages to build tension and suspense in a story where the reader has no idea what the heroine intends to do or even should do. It's a mystery where no one dies. There are lots of curious events and clues, seemingly pregnant with meaning, that turn out to mean something very different than what one thought, or nothing at all. I liked this book very much. Don't go in expecting either belly laughs or Pynchon; it's not that kind of novel. But a very fine one in its own right.

Rating:
Summary: The Intuitionist
Review: In The Intuitionist, Colson Whitehead portrays a caricature of twentieth-century America, its faults and ambitions done in glaring chromatic contrast. Social, political, philosophical, religious, and educational institutions are indicted with a biting wit and bitter irony by Whitehead in this, his first novel. Lila Mae Watson is the first black woman in her city?s department of elevator inspectors, the gem of the metropolis? bulky bureaucracy. There is a schism in the ranks of elevator inspectors between the Empiricists and Intuitionists (any further explaining of the two factions can be explained by the novel) that leads to much internal conflict, a conflict that brings Watson to its center when her perfect record is brought into question by a near fatal accident involving an elevator for which she was responsible.
Whitehead satirizes even the genre itself in a fantastic, almost sci-fi world with the racial issues of our country in the 1950s and a near religious devotion (by some, at least) to the study of elevation. The institutions of race, government, organized crime, and escalatory studies serve not as static symbols of the modern urban landscape but are fluid enough to comment upon social phenomena almost interchangeably. Indeed, the parodies almost seem to parodize traditional satirical depictions. Some reviewers have heralded Whitehead?s work as a contemporary Catch-22 and many will find humor in its philosophical meanderings and extensive hyperbole on the nature of vertical conveyance but the novel lacks the pace and absurdity of Heller?s work. Although I was never made to laugh out loud as with Catch-22 and Whitehead?s view of society is rather bleak, The Intuitionist earns its merits, leading this reader to give it a score of six and a half thumbs up (out of a possible ten).

Rating:
Summary: Huh?
Review: The central analogy of Colson Whitehead's "The Intuitionist" is quite simple: the elevator, an important device in the skyward expansion of metropolitan areas, can also serve to lift blacks into an equal position with whites. It's simple, but it's also, at first thought, quite clumsy. I know that was my reaction upon beginning this book. Just like the advancement of modern engineering principles and the development of newer, stronger materials helped further develop the concrete jungle, so to must other factors assist the racial problem. But Whitehead, an eminently skilled writer, has thought of this too. And he knows something you don't know: it won't end the way you think it will end. Armed with this knowledge, he is able to freely create his world.

And what a world it is. Set in an unnamed metropolis, characterized by "magnificent elevated trains, five daily newspapers, [and] two baseball stadiums" that leaves some of its residents "too afraid to leave the house", Whitehead has created a hermetically sealed society. He never flinches in his portrayal, offering up detail after detail of his little world that are at once believable and credible. The centrepiece of this society, the raison d'etre, is that it takes elevator culture very seriously. A weekly magazine, dedicated to said culture, is called "Lift". Visionaries, such as Elisha Graves Otis and the recently deceased James Fulton, are revered much in the same that Plato or Aristotle are in our world. And the Department of Elevator Inspectors serves as a neat little microcosm of the whole, not to mention a terribly desirable place of employment. This is where the title character, Lila Mae Watson, works. That is until the Number 11 cab at the Fanny Briggs building went into a free fall a day after her inspection ("Verticality is such a risky enterprise"). This is the cataclysmic event off of which the story unfolds.

Lila Mae is a strange creation. She is cynical, headstrong, and fiercely intelligent (Case in point: she "does not expect human beings to conduct themselves in any other way but how they truly are. Which is weak"). She's had a perfect record as an Intuitionist inspector in a world dominated by Empiricists. But she's also learned to live in a racist world where she is the only female elevator inspector. Watch her bite her tongue when a pushy salesman espouses the virtues of skin-lighteners and hair-straighteners. Or see her reaction when, at a yearly banquet thrown by the Department, she's confronted by the antics of Hambone and Mr. Grizzard, a minstrel show eaten up by her white colleagues. Lila Mae must keep her head, for in her search for the truth about the accident she is confronted by a series of shady characters, none of whom she can really trust. Or can she?

It is this part of the book, within the detective story narrative, where Whitehead really shines. He mixes into his dystopia nightmare a healthy amount of neo-film noir elements. People are always sizing each other up, doing things to gauge reactions. A security guard asks to see Lila Mae's badge, but he never really looks at it. "He just asked for effect," comments Whitehead's spare narrator. Later, a scene is set inside a hotel room, where "the red neon of the liquor store sign across the street flashes... off and on." You almost expect Humphrey Bogart to emerge from such scenes. Which makes for a fine contrast when you once again realize that you're reading Lila Mae's story. There is nothing Bogart about her.

Up until the final act, I wasn't sure if I bought into all of Whitehead's ideas. However, in that final act, he brings things together so smoothly and so efficiently, I couldn't help but see the light that he was shining right into my face. His elevator analogy congeals nicely. It ably pulls back society's veil to reveal that, as the fictional Mr. Fulton once wrote, "There is another world beyond this one." Pay attention throughout, be patient at the beginning, and trust that what Whitehead has for you at the end will make the whole enterprise worthwhile. Follow this recipe, and you'll be impressed by "The Intuitionist" as much as I was.

Rating:
Summary: plus for creativity, minus for character and plot
Review: there are a lot of genuinely creative ideas in the book, but it's not enough for a novel - either you have to care about the characters or you have to be driven along by the plot. i was continually on the verge of putting it down because i didn't care about the characters OR the plot. ultimately the ceaseless iterations around the elevator metaphor dragged it down as well. i was also hoping it would be more experimental in style - the central ideas lend themselves to a kafka or lem or cortazar-like treatment, but the writing isn't there. the best written parts are the more conventional dramatic sections. on the whole, disappointing.