Ex Libris: Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist

Though I've read Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist only recently, I thought the book has been under the radar of the reading public so much that I thought a review would be an 'act of shedding light'.

But that's not really correct: a check on the blurb inner pages says that Whitehead's first book has been Esquire's Best First Novel of the Year, USA Today Best First Novel of the Year, and GQ Best Book of the Mullenium among others.

Likewise, The Interstitial Arts Foundation even gave high marks for this book.

Interstitial? What's that, you say?

As academician and memoirist Heinz Insu Fenkl says here:

The word 'interstice' comes from the Latin roots inter (between) and sistere (to stand). Literally, it means to 'stand between' or 'stand in the middle.' It generally refers to a space between things: a chink in a fence, a gap in the clouds, a DMZ between nations at war, the potentially infinite space between two musical notes, a form of writing that defies genre classification.

In this case, Whitehead's hard-to-peg novel is interstitial for its use of speculative fiction mixed with noir particulars to address social and racial issues.

To wit: In an unnamed mid-century high-rise city that may or may not be New York City, Lila Mae Watson is a top elevator inspector for the Department of Elevator Inspectors, the first token black female inspector to be admitted. Likewise, Lila Mae is an intuitionist, which riles off the good ol' boys in her department who are mainly empiricists. (The Intuitionist school of thought uses "senses" through meditation to determine the condition of the elevators. On the other hand, the Empiricist school of thought focuses its attention on literal mechanical failures.) Unfortunately, it's election time at the department and Watson has been accused of incompetence when one of the elevators she just inspected came crashing down. As Whitehead writes in the aftermath of the elevator's destruction:

...there's nothing left but the sound of the crash, rising in the shaft, a fall in opposite: a soul.

To prove herself innocent of the crash, Watson goes underground to avoid both intuitionists' patronizing concern and empiricists' murderous attentions, as well as mob gangsters, government agents and the department's own internal affairs investigators. In the course of her quest, she discovers life-altering secrets about the Intuitionist's Founder, James Fulton, a visionary known to have been working on a "black box'' that would revolutionize elevator construction and alter the nature of urban life forever.

Recently, literary wunderkind Michael Chabon said: "Genre isn't just a box to be stuck in; it's also a window to look through." This is quite true in Whitehead's first novel. In The Intuitionist, Whitehead creates an idea of a parallel-universe-- a New York City with 19th-century politics and mores but with 21st century technological advances-- in order to probe at racial differences.

Whitehead does this perfectly through his creative look at elevators: the constant search for verticality and upward mobility in society despite its supposed architectural goal. This is symbolized through the different schools of thought, the high-rise buildings, and the actual fixation on elevators. As Whitehead pointed out succinctly:

"They looked at the skin of things." Lila Mae offers...

White people's reality is built on what things appear to be-- that's the business of Empiricism. They judge them on how they appear when held up to the light, the wear on the carriage buckle, the stress fractures in the motor casing. His skin.

Personally, this is what attracted me to the idea of speculative fiction in the first place: to address issues through imagination, to attack indirectly through speculation, to question tradition through subversion.

And that's why I read this stuff in the first place.