What I Am Reading: "The Intuitionist" by Colson Whitehead

This was a weird book about the first black female elevator inspector in a vaguely '50s crypto-New York City, a city where the elevator inspection department is both very powerful and riven by factionalism. The Empiricists are the normal, technocratic elevator inspectors, and they are trying to deal with the Intuitionists, who are able to sense any defects through direct, psychic communion with the elevator (a process that does not end up receiving very much attention).

The protagonist, Lila Mae Watson, is an Intuitionist. She is drawn into a quest to clear her name while also unraveling various tangled conspiracies between the two factions and their corporate and underworld backers in the run-up to the guild president election. 

As part of this process, she must locate the lost writings of the founder of Intuitionism, James Fulton. This turns out to be harder than it first seems, as Lila Mae is subject to a series of plot twists and double-crosses. Fulton's "writings" are quoted, and he is given to delightful crackpot philosophizing about the nature of elevators and the "black box," a perfect elevator (because it is designed from the elevator's perspective). This brings fond recollections of Le Corbusier and other intense-but-whimsical urban theorists. A book about elevators does, of course, have a strong  element of urbanism, as only high-rises have need of elevators. Fulton's plans for the second elevation that will come about after the perfect elevator is created are analyzed by Lila Mae in a new light after she learns that he himself was a black man passing for white, and other secrets he has buried in his work. It was a fun book.