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The Intuitionist
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2012
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The Intuitionist
Rating:3.5 stars
Publication date:2012

About the author:

COLSON WHITEHEAD is the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad. His other works include The Noble Hustle, Zone One, Sag Harbor, The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and one collection of essays, The Colossus of New York. A National Book Award winner and a recipient of MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships, he lives in New York City.

Description:

This debut novel by the two time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys wowed critics and readers everywhere and marked the debut of an important American writer.
Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.

It is a time of calamity in a major metropolitan city's Department of Elevator Inspectors, and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector in the history of the department, is at the center of it.  There are two warring factions within the department:  the Empiricists, who work by the book and dutifully check for striations on the winch cable and such; and the Intuitionists, who are simply able to enter the elevator cab in question, meditate, and intuit any defects.  
Lila Mae is an Intuitionist and, it just so happens, has the highest accuracy rate in the entire department.  But when an elevator in a new city building goes into total freefall on Lila Mae's watch, chaos ensues.  It's an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the good-old-boy Empiricists would love nothing more than to assign the blame to an Intuitionist.  But Lila Mae is never wrong.
The sudden appearance of excerpts from the lost notebooks of Intuitionism's founder, James Fulton, has also caused quite a stir.  The notebooks describe Fulton's work on the "black box," a perfect elevator that could reinvent the city as radically as the first passenger elevator did when patented by Elisha Otis in the nineteenth century.  When Lila Mae goes underground to investigate the crash, she becomes involved in the search for the portions of the notebooks that are still missing and uncovers a secret that will change her life forever.
Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto, coming soon!
Reviews:

Walter Kirn, Time
"The freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye."
The New York Times Book Review
"Ingenious and starkly original...Literary reputations may not always rise and fall as predictably as elevators, bit if there's any justice in the world of fiction, Colson Whitehead's should be heaing toward the upper floors."
Newsweek
"The most engaging literary sleuthing you'll read this year. . . . What makes the novel so extraordinary is the ways in which Whitehead plays with notions of race."
The New Yorker
"Whitehead's prose is graceful and often lyrical, and his elevator underworld is a complex, lovingly realized creation."
Walter Mosley
"The Intuitionist is the story of a love affair with the steel and stone, machinery and architecture of the city. It's not a pretty love, but a working-class passion for the stench of humanity that its heroine, Lila Mae Watson, has made her own. But as always with love there is betrayal. This extraordinary novel is the first voice in a powerful chorus to come."
Publisher's Weekly

November 30, 1998
If you've ever wanted to know your elevator inspector better, Whitehead's meaty and mythic first novel may help you get acquainted. Set in a huge, unnamed city, it hinges on the friction between rival groups of inspectors--the Empiricists, who base their appraisals of elevators on careful observation, and the Intuitionists, who know the machines they work with so well that they can sense potential problems simply by standing inside one. When an elevator plummets several stories right after receiving an okay from Lila Mae Watson, the city's first black female Intuitionist elevator inspector, the woman immediately comes under suspicion of a gross error. As accusations cloud the air, she tries to clear her name and finds that her group is not without its scandals. Lily Mae weathers attacks by thugs, political crossfire between municipal factions and a flirtation with romance in a journey towards a plot twist thick with irony and social criticism. In this Gotham-esque sweatbox, every footstep echoes like a nickel hitting the bottom of a penny bank. Whitehead has created a self-contained universe in this novel, complete with its own mythology and history (re-created at length in the course of the narrative), and it is to his credit that he is able to weave in a meditation on race. He has a completely original story to tell, and he tells it well, successfully intertwining multiple plot lines and keeping his reader intrigued from the outset.

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