The Intuitionist

It is a time of calamity in a major metropolitan city's Department of Elevator Inspectors, and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector in the history of the department, is at the center of it. There are two warring factions within the department: the Empiricists, who work by the book and dutifully check for striations on the winch cable and such; and the Intuitionists, who are simply able to enter the elevator cab in question, meditate, and intuit any defects. Lila Mae is an Intuitionist and, it just so happens, has the highest accuracy rate in the entire department. But when an elevator in a new city building goes into total freefall on Lila Mae's watch, chaos ensues. It's an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the good-old-boy Empiricists would love nothing more than to assign the blame to an Intuitionist. But Lila Mae is never wrong. The sudden appearance of excerpts from the lost notebooks of Intuitionism's founder, James Fulton, has also caused quite a stir. The notebooks describe Fulton's work on the "black box, " a perfect elevator that could reinvent the city as radically as the first passenger elevator did when patented by Elisha Otis in the nineteenth century. When Lila Mae goes underground to investigate the crash, she becomes involved in the search for the portions of the notebooks that are still missing and uncovers a secret that will change her life forever.

Review :
"Highly imaginative and stylish."
--Vanity Fair
"Whitehead's debut novel can claim a literary lineage that includes Orwell, Ellison, Vonnegut, and Pynchon, yet is it resoundingly original. . .The story is mesmerizing, but it is Whitehead's shrewd and sardonic humor and agile explications of the insidiousness of racism and the eternal conflict between the material and the spiritual that make this such a trenchant and accomplished novel."
--Booklist
"A dizzingly-high-concept debut of genuine originality, despite its indebtedness to a specific source, ironically echoes and amusingly inverts Ralph Ellison's classic Invisible Man. . .A many-leveled narrative equally effective as a detective story and philosophical novel. Ralph Ellison would be proud."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Meaty and mythic. . .Whitehead has created a self-contained universe in this novel, complete with its own mythology and history. . .He has a completely original story to tell, and he tells it well, successfully intertwining multiple plot lines and keeping his reader intrigued from the outset."
--Publishers Weekly
"Dark, smart, funny."
--Details
"An elegant, erudite take on the sci-fi staples of science vs. humanity and head vs. heart."
--Spin
"Brilliant, funny, poetic. . .a complex mix of contemporary issues and the urban imagery of 40 years ago. . .The style [Whitehead] creates to portray this world is equally intricate and rich--a supple, jazzy instrument that can swing from deadpan satirical fantasy to a straight-ahead portrayal of the pain and stoicism of black people living in a ham-fisted white world, looking for the ultimate elevator that will take them up and out."
--TheUtne Reader
"Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist is an enormously accomplished first novel, a meditation on race and technology and imagination that is absolutely dazzling. Dazzling too is his hero, Lila Mae Watson. . How great it would be if there were more like her in life; how wonderful that we have such a brave dame in art."
--from Brave Dames and Wimpettes by Susan Isaacs
"The Intuitionist is the story of a love affair with the steel and stone, machinery and architecture of the city. It's not a pretty love, but a working-class passion for the stench of humanity that its heroine, Lila Mae Watson, has made her own. But as always with love there is betrayal. This extraordinary novel is the first voice in a powerful chorus to come."
--Walter Mosley
"This splendid novel reads as though a stray line in Pynchon or Millhauser had been meticulously unfolded to reveal an entire world, one of spooky, stylish alternate-Americana, as rich and haunted as our own. The care and confidence of the prose, the visionary metaphor beating like a heart at the center--these do not outweigh the poignance and humor, the human presence here. The Intuitionist rises someplace new, and very special."
--Jonathan Lethem
"The Intuitionist is a fascinating novel, full of quirky insights and beautifully imagined characters."
--Gary Indiana
"A multilayered debut novel...The Intuitionist reads like a pure feat of the imagination, elevated by...stylistic sorcery and a gnawing sense of the narrative's urban dislocation."
--Village Voice Literary Supplement