5. The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead

[rydra_wong]

There are books you can't put down, and then there are books you put down a third of the way through so that you can run to the computer and start ordering more books by the same author. The Intuitionist is that good.

I don't know whether this should be counted as sf/f, slipstream, magical realism, or something else altogether: its very own genre of lucid-dreaming surreal noir, a vision of a city that might be New York riven by the conflict between rival schools of elevator inspectors, the Empiricists with their faith in dutiful physical inspection and the Intuitionists who aspire to sense defects by tuning into the the soul of the machine itself.

Lila Mae Watson is the first "colored" woman (the book is set in what feels like the '40s or '50s) to become an elevator inspector - and she's an Intuitionist. When an elevator she inspected inexplicably goes into freefall, she finds herself at the centre of a web of political intrigue, where race, class, secrecy and mysticism intersect in the hunt for the "black box": the design for a perfect elevator.

Lila Mae is a fantastic protagonist: dour, self-contained, and, like the novel, utterly herself. But what makes the novel absolutely compelling is the narrative voice. Something like Don DeLillo, something like Walter Mosley (who contributed a well-deserved blurb), and a lot that's all Whitehead's own. This doesn't read like the first novel it is; it's unhesitatingly confident and polished in its idiosyncrasies:

Anyway, slept. In the biggest bed she has ever slept in, swimmable, Lila Mae buoyant despite her negligible body fat (a skinny one, she is). The bed possesses an undertow conducive to dreaming, but she doesn't remember her dreams when she wakes. On waking, her half-dreaming consciousness segues into a recollection of her visit to the Fanny Briggs building. It was simple: that's what Lila Mae is thinking about in her room at 117 Second Avenue.

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

There are books you can't put down, and then there are books you put down a third of the way through so that you can run to the computer and start ordering more books by the same author.

Yay! You, too? I put a library hold on John Henry Days because I was trying to be good about spending money and then ended up buying The Colossus of New York and Apex Heals the Hurt anyway, because I just couldn't wait.

[rydra_wong]

Oh, man, the prose style. So good.

Btw, if you've ever written any posts on Whitehead, I'd love links ...

*looks hopeful*

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I haven't written it up yet (I am *so* behind on writing up my reading, it's disgraceful), but there are some during-read mentions here (http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/715389.html) and here (http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/715593.html) (with people elaborating in comments).

[rydra_wong]

Eeeeeee, thank you!

*runs to read*

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Oh--and heresluck turned me onto the poetry of Kevin Young, a friend and sometime writing group member of Whitehead's. So far, I've read Jelly Roll: A Blues and most of Black Maria and adore them.

[rydra_wong]

Thanks for the rec!

[carenejeans.livejournal.com]

This book sounds right up my alley!

So... I went to check it out and clicked on a review of Whitehead's second book, John Henry Days (because that sounded intriguing too). Not to hijack your post here, but the review -- by Jonathan "Too Cool For Oprah" Franzen -- made me livid. So of course I have to share that fun feeling:

"Colson Whitehead's first novel, ''The Intuitionist,'' was a lively comic fantasy about a New York City elevator inspector named Lila Mae Watson. The book established Whitehead's intelligence and originality as a novelist, but I wasn't too excited by the world of elevator inspection, and I was frankly irritated by the author's choice of Lila Mae as the protagonist. Although it's technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist's fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level, not male at all? I confess to being unappetized by all three possibilities; and so, fairly or not, I found myself wishing that Whitehead had written about a man."

What a... a... creep! With an attitude like that, I sure hope he only writes about men. Not that I'm tempted to read anything by him to find out.

I wonder what Colson made of a review like that? Geez. Sounds like he's better writer, and probably the better man as well.

Sorry for the outburst! But gah -- *scrubs Franzen from my brain with bleach*

[carenejeans.livejournal.com]

I wonder what Colson made of a review like that?

Erm, I meant Whitehead. We're not on a first-name basis! *goes for more coffee*

[rydra_wong]

That's ... that's ... what?

Well, it does at least save me from ever spending money on one of Franzen's books.

I mean, god knows there are instances where male authors seem to be writing female protagonists as their fantasy sex objects *coughHeinleincough*. But that's clearly not the case with The Intuitionist.

so, fairly or not, I found myself wishing that Whitehead had written about a man.

Because writing about a man is the default, normal state of affairs, of course. No need to speculate about an author's "unappetizing" motives for doing that ...

*headdesks*

[carenejeans.livejournal.com]

Because writing about a man is the default, normal state of affairs, of course.

Indeed. Because his very next paragraph starts:

"But all is forgiven now. Whitehead's new novel, ''John Henry Days,'' not only features a male protagonist, a young freelance journalist named J. Sutter, but cannily engages the interior crisis of manhood in present-day America."

[rydra_wong]

Forgiven for the terrible sin of writing about a woman as if he was foolish enough to imagine she was a person or something like that.

Good grief. It's one of those passages where you find yourself vaguely suspecting (hoping) that it's all deeply ironic in some post-modern way, because surely no-one could actually be saying that with a straight face.

But no.

[rydra_wong]

Ah, and coffeeandink has pointed me to sharing of the WTF-ery:

http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/715593.html

[carenejeans.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link. 8-) I still have to scrub my brain. Because, ew.

[sanguinity]

There's a friend of mine who has a vocal loathing for any film where a lesbian actress plays a straight woman -- he says he finds such portrayals deeply not-credible, and can't think about anything other than that she's a lesbian and wouldn't actually feel that way. I have as yet been able to chink his perceptions on that, or even hold it up to him in a way that he can SEE what he's saying. Or that this belief is HIM, and not coming from the acting.

This statement of Franzen's? Reminds me very much of that.

[cryptoxin.livejournal.com]

Wow, I distinctly remember reading that review when it came out and being speechless.

And I actually do sometimes ask questions when a male novelist writes from the POV of a female protagonist -- not the questions as Franzen's posing them, and not as a default but only when I've gotten far enough into the book to realize that something's not working for me. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head -- um, maybe one of John Updike's Rabbit novels?

So I wouldn't completely say that asking questions is automatically inappropriate or out of bounds -- and there are lots of conceivably productive ways to think about male author/female POV fiction because I do think some interesting things can happen there (though I'd focus on books that work, and avoid the armchair psychoanalysis altogether). But Franzen here is a classic case of "you're doing it wrong." And there's so clearly a confessional impulse behind the "colonize fictional territory" and "young literato" (I don't even want to contemplate "fantasy sex object").

I also can't help but think that there's something going on here regarding a black male author and a black female protagonist -- I can't quite put my finger on it, but I really don't think it's an accident or a coincidence that Franzen voiced these sentiments around this particular book.

I really don't like Franzen, and I felt smugly validated when I read The Corrections and didn't like it either for reasons which felt congruent with my dislike for the author's persona.

And imagine what it would be like to live with him! Better yet, read Envy (http://www.granta.com/extracts/2015) from Granta a few years back, by his (then? still?) partner Kathryn Chetkovich, also a writer -- hence the title, as she focuses on her feelings as she witnesses his literary success while struggling to establish herself as a writer.

[sanguinity]

The Intuitionist really, really didn't work for me. Maybe it went over my head. Or maybe, as an engineer, this intuitionists-good / empricists-bad thing bugged the living daylights out of me. Or both.

[rydra_wong]

Yep, I can see how that might bug you. But I felt the whole book was sufficiently far into the magic realism/fantasy register that it didn't bother me in that way - especially given that towards the end of the book, it was starting to look as if both sides were equally problematic, and had a fairly equal distribution of "bad guys".

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

I'm reading reviews of this book because I'm just starting it myself. I'm about 50 pages in and I have to say that so far it hasn't pinged my bad engineering antenna at all, which I think is because Intuitionism is validated empirically- the reason it has a following is because it produces 10% better accuracy than Empiricist inspection. But maybe this will change. I'll keep reading and we'll see.

[sanguinity]

:: Intuitionism is validated empirically ::

This, I did not know. It probably would have changed my understanding of the book.

There may have been other stuff going over my head, too. To my best recollection, there was nothing that struck me as going over my head, but sometimes things going over your head go high enough that you don't even hear a whooshing noise as they go by.

[cryptoxin.livejournal.com]

I love this book! I'm so glad you posted about it -- I read it as soon as it came out in paperback, but I had nobody to talk about it with. I got two of my friends to read it -- one didn't like it and didn't finish it; the other liked it but didn't have much more to say and just nodded amiably at my enthusiastic babbling.

I remember being intrigued about how closely Whitehead was working within the terrain of what I think of as white boy postmodernism -- Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace (I'll also throw in Dean Motter's early work in comics, specifically Mister X). I couldn't readily connect it with the work of black writers where the term "postmodern" seems useful like Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison. I did see some attenuated affinities with Paul Beatty and Samuel Delaney (or, in retrospect because I hadn't read her yet, Zadie Smith) -- and I had the distinct feeling that The Intuitionist could be productively read alongside Ellison's Invisible Man. I have no idea which, if any, of these authors could be described as influences on Whitehead -- I'm citing them more as influences on me as a reader in how I approached his book. I'd need to think more about your Walter Mosley comparison; I think I can see it, but it never would have occurred to me.

I'm not sure I ever fully got a handle on how to read Lila Mae as a black woman -- and I ended up wondering if maybe that was the point. She seemed utterly real, completely compelling, and entirely resistant to misreading via conventional stereotypes of black women.

I remember thinking about how the book opened up an interesting space to think about the historical role of government/civil service jobs as occupational pathways and vehicles for class mobility for African Americans in the U.S. -- the post office being perhaps the prime example. And that raises all kinds of potentially intriguing issues and questions that I hadn't seen explored much in fiction.

I also enjoyed John Henry Days, though I vaguely remember having mixed feelings about it -- I can't recall why, or if they were resolved by the end of the book. I took a pass on Colossus -- I'm not sure why, I've heard great things about it, but it just wasn't calling out my name. I think I have a weird notion that I don't want to be the kind of New Yorker who reads books about New York? Apex sounds good, and I didn't realize that it had come out in paperback -- of course, now I want to reread The Intuitionist, like, right now....

(By the way, Colson Whitehead has an infrequently-updated blog (http://www.colsonwhitehead.com/))

[rydra_wong]

I'd need to think more about your Walter Mosley comparison; I think I can see it, but it never would have occurred to me.

It may have been partly the effect of reading this pretty much back-to-back with Devil In A Blue Dress, but I was definitely struck by certain similarities in how they handle prose, something in the style - I haven't quite been able to put my finger on it yet (other than that both of them make me want to reread with a pencil and try to study what they're doing, word by word).

Of course there's a more obvious thematic link too, in the way both Devil In A Blue Dress and The Intuitionist deal with the issue of passing, and are both riffing on noir tropes while focusing on issues of race that classic noir elided.

It'll be interesting to see if the comparison seems to hold up as I read more of both authors.

[cryptoxin.livejournal.com]

Huh, I was going more with a recoding-urban-space theme.

But I'm a lousy reader for this kind of discussion -- I'm totally engaged while I'm reading, but within a few months I've forgotten most of what I read. Including crucial plot points, central characters, and how the book ends -- I only retain fragments and impressions. For example, I didn't -- and actually still don't -- recall anything about passing in those books, even though it's always been a major theme of interest to me in terms of how it gets represented (I have a whole tl;dr riff in my head about how 20th c. passing narratives -- across literary & popular fiction, books & film -- entwined questions of race with gender & sexuality in all kinds of complicated ways).

(tangential rec if you haven't read her: Nella Larsen's novel(la)s, Quicksand and Passing -- she's associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and they're both amazing)

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Yes, this book is amazing! I picked it up because of coffeeandink and loved it (despite my own empiricist leanings).

[http://users.livejournal.com/_minxy_/]

Huh, you and coffeeandink recommend?

*adds to wishlist at Powell's*

[decarnin.livejournal.com]

And then there are books you rec to friends after only reading the first 3 paragraphs of the review...

:-)

This sounds really interesting.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

the conflict between rival schools of elevator inspectors, the Empiricists with their faith in dutiful physical inspection and the Intuitionists who aspire to sense defects by tuning into the the soul of the machine itself.

Wow, this sounds like exactly the kind of thing I like. Thanks for the review.

[poilass.livejournal.com]

This one has been on my wishlist awhile -- will bump it closer to the top! Thanks for the review.

[danceswithwords.livejournal.com]

Oh, I adored that book. I especially liked the way something so seemingly mundane--an elevator--became the doorway to a larger exploration of philosophical worldviews.

I didn't get the sense that the book was set in the 40s or 50s but rather in some politically and technologically amorphous 80s, though there was a certain timeless quality to it.

I also recommend John Henry Days, which has a wonderful historical hook for exploring race and heritage in a way that felt, to me, new and unusual.