"A renegotiation of our
relationship to objects," that would seem to be the explicit point to
Colson Whitehead's first novel, The Intuitionist, but this charming,
fast-paced book actually takes the reader somewhere quite different.
The conceit of the novel is that the elevator, in this
pre-computer-era, very analog, unnamed New York City, is the most
important technological device of the times, at least to those who
inspect them. They have come to take the machines so importantly that
prestigious universities have been established to teach theories of
elevator mechanics under the watchful eye of St. Roland, the patron of
these devotionalists. There has even been a reformation of sorts among
their ranks, with James Fulton, as Luther, veering away from the
empirical techniques of merely looking at the surfaces of gear boxes,
cables, etc., and instead intuiting what the elevator wants, or
separating it from its "elevatorness." Whitehead presents much of this
with a very straight face, giving the reader somewhat indigestible
chunks of information on the performance and mechanics of these
machines, outlining the battle for status among those who service
escalators, explicating the political games between the companies who
design the devices, the Guild which inspects them, and those
Intuitionists and Empiricists who compete for control of the inspectors.
Rather than descending
into a too clever faux-sociological pastiche, however, the book reads
much like a cyber-punk novel in which the science has merely been
back-dated about a hundred years. Computer networks are replaced by
those ranks of gleaming lifts which have changed the shape of the
cities. Now there are rumors of plans for a perfect elevator, a "black
box" designed by James Fulton, originator of Intuitionism, which will
offer the chance to rise to "a second elevation" in which the old
cities would be destroyed again and replaced by new forms unimaginable
to the present.
The trick played on these
genre expectations of salvation through better science, however, is
that Lila Mae Watson, the focal character in this drama, is a black
woman struggling for a place in pre-Civil Rights era America. She has
unwittingly come to the attention of the most powerful players in the
politics of elevation, but finds that her struggle won't be to change
the face of technology. Rather, her frightening experiences with those
in power, those striving for power, and those keeping an eye on the
powerful, lead her toward changing her notions of elevating the race.
And as she digs deeper past the deceptions and conspiracies around her,
she learns that she herself may even be able to play a role through
this black box in lifting black America.