The intuitionist

Whitehead's vivid imagination is on full display in this novel, which creates a fanciful world of elevator inspectors as an allegory for American race relations. When the inspector Lila Mae is thrust into controversy over an elevator accident, she goes on a dangerous journey in which she comes to question what she thought she knew about "intuitionism," her methodology for inspecting elevators (as opposed to the "empiricists"). The plot has enough twists and turns to keep things moving for the reader, and the world that Whitehead builds is both internally coherent and wholly original.

Lila Mae is an elevator inspector, and she is one of the first black, the first woman, and also one of the few Intuitionists, because elevator inspection is either done by Empiricism or by Intuitionism. Yet as one recently inspected elevator fails dramatically, Lila Mae is pulled into a political investigation whose fault it was, and if either Blacks, females or intuitionists are to blame. And of course everything in this book is meant allegoric.

It takes place in an unnamed city in the early 20th century, and it meanders between facts (like Elisha Graves Otis appears) and fiction, yet the city is full of skyscrapers and feels like either New York or Gotham City (I know).

The plot is fast and mysterious. The dialogues is funny and biting, and the entire story makes you laugh until it doesn't somehow.

I liked it alot and will surely …

So, there were some really sharp lines, interesting intrigue, and then it just turned into a slog. I'm sure this is great if you're a lit professor or something, but I'm not. I just wanted a good book to read, not a homework assignment. My favorite scene was the dime-a-dance place, and it had absolutely zero to do with anything else in the story, but it had the most emotion.

I didn't expect to enjoy a book about elevators so much. But then it's really not about elevators. It's in large part about race, about different forms of seeing and experiencing the world, all wrapped up in a compelling mystery.

It's a critique of kinds of knowledge that proclaim themselves as absolute and the bearers of truth, especially when that knowledge is used to uphold forms of oppression. It's a gesture towards other forms of being and knowing, ones that at times elude detection by the powers that be as a means of survival or marronage and at others confront them head on, empowered to create a new world.

It's engaging, accessible, empathic, surprising, and witty. And also talks a lot about elevators.

In the world of elevator inspectors, the “empiricists” rule by the book and detailed inspection. But the city’s first black female elevator inspector is one of the “intuitionists” who inspect by meditating on the nature of the elevator. She soon finds herself set up for a literal fall to discredit the intuitionists amid election year.

A peculiar halting noir with two main features. The story is one of mid-twentieth century type bigotry set in a Steampunk-like world where there are two battling philosophies on the nature and function of elevators, the Empiricists and the Intuitionists. The protagonist is an African-American Intuitionist elevator inspector-ess who takes the role of the detective and becomes something more than that. Among the author’s various accomplishments are the avoidance of all the puns and simple metaphors that spring to mind, including who is taking the fall when an elevator plunges to its destruction and the significance of the elevation of the African-American characters to become elevator inspectors. Ultimately, I think the reader’s question will be, “Is there some other message for me here in this complex construction?” If I knew, I would rate this more highly.