The Intuitionist

The IntuitionistThis debut novel by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad wowed critics and readers everywhere and marked the debut of an important American writer. Nominated as one of America's best loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read It is a time of calamity in a major metropolitan city's Department of Elevator Inspectors, and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector in the history of the department, is at the

This debut novel by the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad wowed critics and readers everywhere and marked the debut of an important American writer.

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read

It is a time of calamity in a major metropolitan city's Department of Elevator Inspectors, and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector in the history of the department, is at the center of it. There are two warring factions within the department: the Empiricists, who work by the book and dutifully check for striations on the winch cable and such; and the Intuitionists, who are simply able to enter the elevator cab in question, meditate, and intuit any defects.

Lila Mae is an Intuitionist and, it just so happens, has the highest accuracy rate in the entire department. But when an elevator in a new city building goes into total freefall on Lila Mae's watch, chaos ensues. It's an election year in the Elevator Guild, and the good-old-boy Empiricists would love nothing more than to assign the blame to an Intuitionist. But Lila Mae is never wrong.

The sudden appearance of excerpts from the lost notebooks of Intuitionism's founder, James Fulton, has also caused quite a stir. The notebooks describe Fulton's work on the "black box," a perfect elevator that could reinvent the city as radically as the first passenger elevator did when patented by Elisha Otis in the nineteenth century. When Lila Mae goes underground to investigate the crash, she becomes involved in the search for the portions of the notebooks that are still missing and uncovers a secret that will change her life forever.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Anchor Books
Published: 01/04/2000
ISBN: 9780385493000
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.49lbs
Size: 8.05h x 5.25w x 0.79d
Award: Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award - Nominee

Review Citations: New York Times 01/09/2000 pg. 32
Essence 04/01/2001 pg. 86
Village Voice 04/29/2009 pg. 35