Going up

The past summer has been full of books for me, and few have sated my thirst after reading the Pevear translation of Anna Karenina. I've searched all of my standbys and classic writers, Fitzgerald, Forster (and others not beginning with "F"), but none have kept my attention after Tolstoy. That is, until I opened up Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist.

It's about elevator inspectors, and it's exhilarating.

Two warring factions in the Department of Elevator Inspectors vie for dominance: The Empiricists, who go by the book and rigorously check every structural and mechanical detail, and the Intuitionist, whose observational methods involve meditation and instinct. Set in a dirty, working class, mob-run American metropolis sometime after the civil rights movement, the book focuses on Lila Mae Watson, the first black female inspector in the country.

The book quickly unwinds form this initial novelty (elevator inspectors? really? how quaint) into a dark and hyper-realistic city with heavy suggestions of Film Noir, while going off on philosophical excursions into Lila Mae's educational life, and delving into her struggle with racism and politics. Blade Runner comes to mind, and much of the descriptors of the book I can think of come from film, rather than literature. But the writing is incredibly artful, not only the prose but the structure as well.

And while the book is going in what seems like one hundred directions at once, it's all headed upwards. The elevator provides not only the organizing content, but melds all of these ideas and themes into one focus. Never before have I considered the theoretical, psychological and even social implications of these metal boxes, but this work of art has given me new eyes onto the dark chutes we so depend on.

The book is a thriller, a philosophical investigation of culture and fear, an excursion of dark humor and is an entirely rich, full invented world in it's own right. From a vivid flashback to Lila Mae's final inspector's examination to the random mentions of Lift magazine, the world unfurls without pretense, each one accomplished with a whip-crack.

From the book:

"'If we have decided that elevator studies - nuts and bolts Empiricism - imagined elevators from a human, and therefore inherently alien point of view, wouldn't the next logical step, after we've adopted the Intuitionist perspective, be the build an elevator the right way? With what we've learned?'

'Construct and elevator from the elevator's point of view?'

'Wouldn't that be the perfect elevator?'"

The Intuitionist is just such a thing: a piece of steel constructed from air, a book separate from book-ness. Frankly, it's an ascension.