The Intuitionist

"This is probably the most ‘pure’ thriller on the list, and in some ways it’s also the most allegorical. It takes place in a version of mid-century New York City, perhaps a decade or two before the Civil Rights Era. This was a time of large-scale Black migration to northern cities. And in the imaginative world of the novel, one of the most important jobs you can have in such a city is that of elevator inspector. The main character, Lila Mae Watson, is a Black female elevator inspector—the first. She is what’s called an ‘intuitionist’. There are two competing schools of elevator inspection: empiricism, which examines the elevator machinery . . . well, empirically, and intuitionism, which relies on an uncanny, quasi-spiritual sense of what’s going on inside an elevator. There’s a great deal of tension and mistrust between the two schools, and a backdrop of political machinations and corruption. For the first time it seems that an intuitionist might be elected Chair of the Elevator Guild and chief of elevator inspectors. Then an elevator Lila Mae has inspected crashes. This sets the plot in motion. Was the crash an act of sabotage, meant to undermine the intuitionist candidate before the election? This possibility sends Lila Mae underground to try to discover whether she was set up. The book takes off from there in countless ingenious directions. This is a great point. Metaphysical fiction asks you to be comfortable in a world that won’t make perfect sense—not the way you expect reality in life or most fiction to make sense. But it does, I think, have to satisfy you on at least one of the two levels: either the mystery of the plot must resolve, or the mystery destabilizing everyday reality must be explained. Kafka may not be truly metaphysical in the sense I mean because he gives you neither satisfaction. The Intuitionist is an interesting book because it tiptoes right along border between metaphysical and physical reality. There’s a deeper question that emerges by the end of the novel which I don’t want to spoil. But all along, the opposition between the empiricists and the intuitionists is slightly unstable. It operates as a metaphor for different ways of knowing or making sense of the world—through a hyperrational or mechanistic lens, or via a somewhat more intuitive, spiritual, or philosophical one. By the end, I think you may feel that neither one nor the other is exactly right, or can exist alone. Can I say one more thing before we move on? There are many clever things about this book. It’s beautifully plotted and written. And at first it seems strange that Whitehead has taken elevators as his central theme. But you quickly realize how well they work on both a physical and metaphorical level. The development of the modern city occurred in large part thanks to elevators. You couldn’t really have buildings much above five or six stories before they came along. So this urban world Whitehead brings us into, and the well-known historical and racial drama behind it, is literally made possible by elevators. But elevators then become an incredible metaphor for the idea of personal uplift, on the one hand, and racial uplift, on the other. And beyond that, for spiritual or religious transcendence—there’s talk of a ‘second elevation’—over and above the narrow bounds of the political moment. It’s perfect and expansive and extends out in manifold directions. The way it works on both literal and metaphorical levels at the same time is core to how metaphysical literature, as I think of it, operates. Absolutely. When we’re kids, we do this naturally, because we haven’t fully segregated the literal, metaphorical, and sonic qualities of language in our minds. I, for instance—speaking of railroads—pictured a locomotive when I heard my parents use the word ‘expression,’ since the only related term I knew was ‘express train’. ‘Friday’ I associated with a frying pan. But we lose this awareness as we age, and it takes significant imagination for an adult to recover the ingenuous vision of a child."