Theoretical Elevators

The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead is set in a city that's a lot like New York, in a time that might be the 1950s. This city has not spread into suburbs, but rushed upwards into towering skyscrapers. Elevator inspectors command great respect in this city. Children long to be elevator inspectors someday. Lila Mae Watson carries the badge, wears the suit. But she has three strikes against her: she is a woman, she is black, and she is an Intuitionist.

You see, there are two schools of thought: the Empiricists believe that an elevator is simply a machine. The Intuitionists, followers of James Fulton, the brilliant and mad former dean of the Institute for Vertical Transport, believe in a spiritual elevator, one that lies beyond the physical details that one can measure and describe. They yearn for ascent, find meaning in verticality, reject the merely rational Empirical world. Lila Mae inspects elevators without looking at them. She has the best record in the Department.

Then an elevator, recently inspected by Lila Mae, plunges in freefall. Her reputation is ruined and she is the subject of an investigation by the Department of Elevator Inspectors' fearsome Internal Affairs Bureau. She goes on the lam to find out who sabotaged the elevator, and why. Is she a pawn in a larger plot by Empiricists to discredit Intuitionism? Did the other black inspector, the ingratiating Pompey, have something to do with it? What about the delightfully-named mobster Johnny Shush?

The Intuitionist is funny and thoughtful, both utterly fanciful and unexpectedly serious. It's a tremendously sensitive book about race, depicting a society that is unintegrated and racially polarized. Lila Mae and other "coloreds" (as they are called) face constant discrimination; they mistrust all white people on principle. The language people use is racial, even when they're not openly talking about race. Lila Mae is a true outsider. For her, Intuitionism represents a longing to purify the world’s corruption, a calling for people to look beneath the surface.

My very favorite thing about this book is its beautiful prose. This paragraph, taken almost at random, describes the Department's annual ball:

Rick Raymond and the Moon-Rays, smart in white tuxedos, summon ditties upbeat in tempo and inconsolate in lyric from the instruments they have purchased on lay-away. Rick Raymond notices that the elevator inspectors do not dance. This is not a solid rule among their clan so much as the tasteless fruit of learned helplessness. They don't know where to place their feet, have untold psychic bruises still tender from adolescent embarrassments and don't, collectively, dance. But Rick Raymond and the Moon-Rays are pros. They have weathered much worse gigs than this.

This book is especially good aloud. Check out the book or try the audiobook.