I was looking for something new to read for Black History Month, and one name that kept coming up was Colson Whitehead, award-winning author of several novels including The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. Since I haven’t had a chance to read any of Whitehead’s books up until now, I decided to start with his debut novel from 1999, The Intuitionist.
The book takes place in an unnamed metropolis, something like a 20th-century New York with a decidedly 19th-century social structure. Lila Mae Watson is the first black woman to be accepted to the Department, which earns her the resentment and outright dislike of her coworkers. She’s also caught up in an interdepartmental war between the Empiricists – who do their job based on rigid scientific rules – and her own faction, the Intuitionists – who work with an almost mystical talent of observation and instinct.
Lila Mae is one of the best Intuitionists around, with the highest accuracy rate in the Department. Then an accident happens on her watch and she has to clear her name while dodging mob thugs and power-hungry politicians, dealing with corporate intrigue and possible romance, and also stumbling across secrets that make her question everything she’s based her life and her career around.
And the backdrop of all of this? Elevator inspection. The accident was the crash of a brand-new elevator that Lila Mae had just finished inspecting. The book is absolutely not played for laughs, and it’s one of the most interesting metaphors I’ve seen for racial identity and having one’s faith challenged in, well, pretty much everything.
It’s a new elevator, freshly pressed to the rails, and it’s not built to fall this fast.
There are a few science fiction elements here; mostly in the alternate universe city, and the ways that Lila visualizes how an elevator “feels”, closing her eyes and seeing geometric shapes that represent the vibration of motion, spikes and octagons appearing alongside a blue cone showing whether buffers are worn out or mechanical governors are faulty. In a lot of ways though the book is more sci-fi-adjacent. This is a universe that’s very close our own, with elements of actual history (like Elisha Otis’s demonstration at the Crystal Palace in the 1850’s, more on that later), and an almost overwhelming amount of information about elevators, how they run, how they break, and who benefits from each.
Arbo equipped their newest model with an oversized door to foster the illusion of space, to distract the passenger from what every passenger feels acutely about elevators. That they ride in a box on a rope in a pit. That they are in the void.
For the main characters, elevators are their whole world. They’re what makes society work, what launches political careers and makes all kinds of skullduggery worthwhile. Whitehead goes on for pages of fascinating, obscure minutia of elevator brands, the special features pushed by the manufacturers at trade conventions. There are journalists working for elevator-industry magazines, staking out a mall to collect data for their latest article, “Understanding Patterns of Escalator Use in Department Stores Simultaneously Equipped With Elevators.”
Even more important than the workings of the elevators is what they mean. Characters talk reverently about “verticality”, they get into philosophical arguments that portray the elevator as something that has agency apart from humans, that becomes Schrodinger’s Elevator between floors. (If an elevator arrives when everyone who summoned it has left, do the doors still open?) Elisha Otis, the inventor of the Safety Elevator, is treated almost like a saint. (Contrary to what you may think, the big change in cities – often referred to as “The First Elevation” – didn’t happen with the invention of the elevator. It happened with the invention of something that would keep elevators from falling.)
But what everyone feels for Elisha Otis is nothing compared to what Lilia Mae and the other Intuitionists feel for the recently departed James Fulton, creator of Intuitionism and possible inventor of “the black box”, something that will bring about The Second Elevation: the fabled Perfect Elevator.
The diary shows that he was working on an elevator, and that he was constructing it on Intuitionist principles. From what we can tell from his notes, he finished it. There’s a blueprint out there somewhere.
I really want to discourage anyone from thinking that this is a goofy story about obsessive government employees. This is a gritty, dark cityscape, and the characters are playing a serious game for serious stakes. Whitehead’s writing style captures both the Noir feel and the almost religious-like attitude towards Verticality; sometimes in clipped sentence fragments, with shocking information delivered in the space between paragraphs, between the curt ending of one sentence and the “moving right along” tone of the next. Other times he uses flowery prose, long asides, passages that stretch on and on until they almost become poetry. Ode to the elevator, ode to the crowds in the shopping department. Ode to a bone that’s been rudely broken. Ode to screams.
Brilliant and incredibly cautions, Lila Mae also has to balance between hard reality and her aspirations. There’s the impulse to mourn poor shy Number Eleven who never harmed anyone, and the need to find out how it could have crashed in the way it did, before someone destroys her career as part of their plan to do…something. It’s not clear to her at first who would benefit. Not that this matters to most of the people around her, who only needed one excuse to let all the simmering anger come to the surface.
It’s one thing to understand the muck of things, accept it, live in it, and quite another to have that muck change so suddenly and dramatically, to stumble down to a newer, deeper shelf.
I read a dream interpretation for elevator dreams years ago; apparently dreams about stairs represent where you think you’re going, in a relationship, a job, or your life. Dreams about elevators mean the same thing, except that you don’t think you have any control over where you’re going. This seems particularly appropriate here, with what Lila Mae and every black man and woman has to endure in this reality where slavery is technically over, but barring black people from living or working in any place upscale enough to even have a passenger elevator is fine.
There’s a relentless barrage of barriers to her race, creating a sense of claustrophobia not unlike being trapped inside a small box moving inside the void. There’s the sub-standard housing, the cold shoulder from her coworkers, the not-always-silent attitude that a woman, a black woman, couldn’t possibly be qualified to be an Inspector so she must have gotten the job because of politics. Or pity. The Old Guard’s suspicion of the fancy new method of Intuitionism sounds deliberately close to the conservative attitude that things were better before society started giving these new ideas (or people) any power. I never sensed a woe-is-me attitude from Lila about any of this, just a grim acknowledgement that it is what it is.
Oh, and rage. There’s a lot of that too.
She thinks, these white men see her as a threat but refuse to make her a threat, cunning, duplicitous. They see her as a mule, ferrying information back and forth, not clever or curious enough to explore the contents. Brute. Black.
It’s not just at the people who crush them down, portray them as animals, and then expect them to be grateful for every scrap that gets dropped to them. The ones who came first, who endured every kick and spit and cringeworthy blackface performance, and laughed along until they clawed a place for themselves, they rage at the ones who come second, after the worst is over (supposedly over). And the ones who came second despise them for taking it, for making the ones in power think that taking abuse is what they’re for.
The story is a meditation on race, on the elevator’s promise that people can “ascend” (just…not all people), and the many ways people betray their own beliefs and history. Or don’t. It’s also a cracking mystery novel, with daring invasions, a heart-in-your throat race between the the elevator and the stairs, a truly horrifying interrogation, betrayals, moments of dry humor (example: the student who’s design for the perfect elevator consists of an empty shaft and “an eerie dripping sound.”), and moments of unexpected beauty, like the dreamlike scene with the dime-a-dance girls inside the dance hall with the rain pouring down outside.
A lot of it was over my head, and the sections of Fulton’s journals using phrases like “The black box is the elevator-citizen of the elevator world” didn’t always help. Sometimes I wouldn’t know what they’re talking about. Sometimes I thought I did, and then all of a sudden something would happen that turned everything on its side, or showed everything I thought I understood in a completely different light.