The Intiutitionist

 The Intiutionist

By Colson Whitehead

I think I stumbled on this one while looking for The Hobbit at the Woodstock Library. There was an array of

Colson Whitehead books, and I thought this one looked interesting.

It takes place in a kind of alternate Jim Crow United States, one where elevators hold, well, an elevated position in society. Elevators are given the credit for the progress of American cities, allowing them to build up and therefore modernize. They hold a certain mystique. To keep them running properly, there arises a cadre of elevator inspectors, replete with badges, who rival the Police in terms of power and prestige. There is, however, a rift in these ranks, a philosophical schism in how to properly inspect an elevator. There are the empiricists, whose work centers around the physical inspection of the mechanical workings of the elevator. And then there are the intuitionist, who seek to become one with the elevator as they ride it, feeling any troubles rather than seeing them.

Lila Mae Watson is an intuitionist -- and she is never wrong. Until one day when an elevator she had just inspected at a new city building crashes to the bottom of its shaft. No one is hurt, but a scandal ensues. It is all the more troubling because it is an election year, and the two candidates represent the two elevator inspection schools. Rumors abound. Was it sabotage? And then, out of the blue, there appears in the mailboxes of many prominent elevator people portions of a notebook once owned by James Fulton, the most revered elevator theorist in history. The papers hint at a "black box", a perfect elevator, and both sides rush to find the rest of the plans.

Lila Mae becomes something of a pawn in this battle, until she reveals what the reader has been thinking all along: It's just a big joke. James Fulton invented impiricism to see if anyone would believe him. And they did. And then, strangely enough, he did. It's a little like Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline, where he disguised his voice to see if anyone would still buy the record and it became beloved. 

I really liked this book. It is a wry commentary on race and mass delusion disguised with a plot that keeps you reading.