Amazon.co.uk Review
Lila Mae is the anti-heroine of this startling debut by American journalist Colson Whitehead. The first coloured elevator inspector in the city, she is a pupil of the Intuitionist school of thought and is able to tell what is wrong with an elevator through intuitive communication with the machinery. Most of her fellow workers however belong to the Empiricist camp, and prefer to carry out routine conventional inspections. The simmering animosity between the two factions comes to the boil when an elevator that Lila Mae has inspected unexpectedly crashes. Solitary and taciturn Lila Mae suspects a conspiracy, and when rumours start circulating of a lost black box that contains the blueprint of the perfect elevator devised by the founder of Intuitionism and Lila Mae's hero, the late James Fulton, her conviction in the philosophical beliefs of her dead mentor compels her to unearth the truth. The surreality of the plot beguiles the seriousness with which Whitehead treats his underlying themes of racial and gender tension, and the use of the elevator works as a brilliant abstract metaphor for the organisation of society within a metropolis. Whitehead litters his deftly honed prose with pithy observations on everything from the construction of individual identity to philosophical absurdities on the nature of "elevatorness". It's an absolute joy to read, and one of the most original novels to be published in 1998. --F.F. Garden

Synopsis
As one of the Intuitionists, Lila Mae Watson, an elevator inspector, is able to detect defects purely by tuning into the machinery. The opposition, the Empiricists, practise routine physical inspection. When a new elevator on Lila's rounds goes into freefall, her solitary existence is shattered.

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews   A Big Disappointment, 20 Mar 2007 By  watercolour (London) - See all my reviews The opening sentence was used as an example in a 'how to write' book, by a professional author and literary agent, so I ordered it on the strength of that recommendation. I was looking forward to reading it but I personally found it slow, padded-out, dull and predictable. It was so slow I got to the point I really didn't care about the outcome.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? (Report this)   Utterly Enjoyable Abstract Allegory, 23 Feb 2002 By  A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews       Whitehead's debut novel signals the arrival of talent one can look forward to reading for many years-a talent displayed as learned, playful, and enigmatic in this melange of genres. This book demands close scrutiny and examination to uncover it's layers of meaning. Aside from some backstory in the South, the book is set in a stylized New York sometime in what seems to be the 1920s-40s. Like Magnus Mills' rural settings for his wonderful black comedies All Quiet on the Orient Express, and The Restraint of Beasts, this is a place both recognizable to us and slightly askew. The story concerns a city elevator inspector, Lila Mae, who is the first black woman to hold such a position. In this setting, the civil service position holds a level of prestige and authority, and one must graduate from a Ivy Leaguesque school to get a plumb New York job. Lila Mae is also an "intuitionist", part of a small minority of elevator inspectors who intuit problems rather than carry out mechanical inspections. When an elevator she's recently inspected goes into a freefall, she's forced underground to try and discover who sabotaged it and why, or else she'll take the fall (no pun intended). Whitehead then starts riffing with many traditional pulp/noir mystery elements: crusading journalist, wisecracking mob heavies, duplicitous love interest, taciturn deadpan hero, big money interests, a maggufin, etc.-but clearly there's more going on. It appears to be some kind of racial allegory, but one that's far to abstract and sophisticated for me to take more than a stab at. One intriguing review described the book as "a sophisticated picture of the Science Wars and the Academic Left." I'm in no position to comment on that characterization, but apparently you can check out a book called Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science for more information on that battle. In any event, whatever the deeper meaning, the novel is quite enjoyable on its surface level as Whitehead fashions a fascinating and entirely convincing elevator inspector culture, an entirely human protagonist, and a page-turning intrigue.  Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you?