The Intuitionist

Colson Whitehead

Subtlely set in Manhattan, as the city that is the place to be if you are interested in vertical transport, and utilizing tensions within the Elevator Inspectors Guild to tell the story. Lila Mae Watson is the first female, black inspector in the history of the guild. She is also an intuitionist, which puts her already at odds with the empiricists who currently dominate the guild. There is an accident with an elevator that she inspected and she is pulled into the machinations of the guild politics. However, she does not see what is happening as politics. She sees an existential question, exploring her own identity as an inspector, a woman and black. And while she is clearly intuitionist in the world of verticality, Whitehead really tells Lila Mae's story using empirical observations of the events surrounding her. This is billed as a racial allegory, but it seems to me that it is really an exploration of identity, with the protagonist being on the outside of dominant culture on three counts (intuitionist, woman, black). Interesting at the least, but I suspect I will be thinking about this for awhile.

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