The Intuitionist

The Intuitionist (1999) by Colson Whitehead

Genre: Detective-style mystery - with henchmen and misdirects and someone caught in the middle - in which the surrealist metaphor is straightforwardly baked into the context of the setting so that you try to solve the case while layers of how the world works are unfolded for you.

Recommended for: Anyone who enjoys a story where they are trying to figure out if the good guys are actually the bad guys or if the bad guys are actually the good guys and who are we supposed to trust (?), but with a philosophical debate at the heart of it that you’re more fascinated by than tempted to take a side on.

Buy here or check out at your local library. (Don’t go to the Jeff Bezos website).

I realized recently that I grade authors on a curve, and that curve is Colson Whitehead.

I can enjoy a pretty good book by a pretty good author under a lot of the right circumstances. Where things get dicey is an author whose writing talent is just apparently tremendous halfway through a book. Then I might really start noticing if they’re demonstratively less effective at telling a story than Colson Whitehead.

I don’t have a favorite writer, and I don’t think my wife does either. If you read as much as we do, it feels sort of silly to have a favorite writer (at least an active one; maybe a long-ago writer who holds a special place in your heart). But collectively, it’s probably fair to say that Whitehead is our household’s favorite writer. We talk about his work more than anyone else’s, and we hold his work up as the standard we’re looking for when we want to read. My wife has read all of his novels, and I have read four of the nine he’s written (a tenth is coming out this summer). I could binge through them like she did, but that’s where our personalities differ. She becomes consumed with the art she loves and will devour it with energy and passion. I balance a fear of running out of that resource with a shot of excitement for having more to look forward to. Delayed gratification.

It’s fun being with someone who can have all their emotions heightened by something and the courage to run straight at that thing until there’s nothing left. It doesn’t make me want to emulate her. It just makes me generally inspired and happy. I wouldn’t call it opposites attract. I think two people are always looking to hear and tell stories together as thoughtfully as possible. That’s generally what a beautiful and worthwhile life is. You can do it alone without missing out on that beauty, but it goes without saying why it’s nice to do it with another person.

Approaching those stories with a different instinct is balance. You cover it all and you can go years thinking you never disagreed over a single thing because every discussion felt right. This isn’t all that different than getting used to doing dishes more often than your partner because they cook more than you. Neither is digestion, but both are in service of the meal.

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The Intuitionist is my favorite Whitehead novel. There are so many recurring themes that he proves to excel at over the course of a lot of his novels; music, race, New York City. The theme that fittingly looms so large in his debut is architecture, something you feel pulsing in most of his novels; if not specifically made a theme, then just consistently well-described.

In his debut, he does this fun little trick. The metaphor is fairly obvious. The book is about elevator inspectors, and in the fictional world (an unnamed simulacrum for New York City), elevators are more or less accepted as proof of man’s great achievements in civilization, and so an elevator inspector is a job that carries great responsibility paired with the real life responsibilities that an elevator inspector obviously have to keep us all safe. You don’t have to be an English Literature major to assume that there is a metaphor going on about upward mobility in the United States, as well as clear references toward integration.

The misdirect comes in thinking that a fairly simple metaphor might assist you in the mystery being worked out on every page, which A.) is quite intricate and B.) it does not.

The premise divides inspectors into “intuitionists” and “empiricists.” As you can imagine, intuitionists, are able to inspect elevators without doing everything by the traditional by-the-book methods. They are able to intuit aspects of their job at a high success rate. This is very controversial but becoming more accepted. Our protagonist is an intuitionist, who is framed for an elevator tragedy with political motives. As she tries to escape trouble, she learns bits about the original intuitionists and about a crucial “black box” that proves the entire discipline correct and about corrupt empiricists. She also comes across reasons to doubt all of that.

So, you read. And you have the metaphor. And you have this thrilling mystery that feels in conversation with the metaphor, but you know the metaphor won’t solve the mystery for you. What all that amounts to is an original work with an ease to every page, like you can’t afford to not pay attention and why would you ever consider it?

There’s no end to the list of books I’m thankful for, but for a debut like this one, I can honestly say I have gratitude not only that it was so great, but that it opened up the career of other works for me to take on, inch by inch or like tsunami.

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