In the alternate history of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist elevators have obtained nearly religious importance -- the only way, I suppose, that a man named Otis can be deified -- and a complex political structure has built up around the elevator-inspection industry. Lila Mae Watson has recently become the the first black female elevator inspector in the city. She is also one of the best, even though she follows the heretical inspection philosophy of Intuitionism, which eschews actual inspection for a mystical communion with the spirit of the elevator. (Um, ok.) But then, during an election year, an elevator under her watch undergoes a catastrophic failure, and her Intuitionism -- not to mention her gender, race, and 'tude -- make her an obvious target.

Whitehead's writing style annoyed me. It's not (thank goodness) experimental, but it is easily distracted, constantly spinning off into unnecessary asides that hamper the flow of the story. The writing also contains a few too many deliberately pretty flourishes to feel natural. The result is an authorial voice that is both undisciplined and stilted, for all of Whitehead's obvious skill. He's trying too hard, and it shows.

This creaky overachieving attitude extends to the novel's central premise, which is too implausible to bear the weight that Whitehead heaps upon it. In The Intuitionist, elevators aren't just important: they're all-encompassing. The country's most prestigious universities specialize in elevation; political campaigns rise and fall (so to speak) on the elevator industry's whims; entire creeds center around man's relationship with these vertical machines. And, as it turns out, the entire plot centers around a further implausibility: a mythical "black box" elevator that, being both perfect and inscrutable, threatens the very existence of the inspection industry.

Of course, I doubt that Whitehead meant The Intuitionist's premise to be taken literally. After all, Animal Farm doesn't suffer simply because real pigs don't plot. But for the life of me I couldn't figure out how the whole elevator obsession was supposed to be understood as a metaphor. The most obvious candidates, given the themes of the book, would be race, gender, or class. But all of these attributes -- unvarnished, and decidedly non-figurative -- appear in the book anyway, providing it with many of its most powerful moments. Ironically, the elaborate elevator fantasy at the center of Whitehead's book only distracted me from the few scenes of harrowing reality that he so effectively describes.

Copyright © 2006 Steven Wu