The Game Of the Name: Colson Whitehead's "Apex Hides the Hurt"

With occasional exceptions, it's a given that any author with a great track record and multiple novels will have at least one dud or misstep along the way. If this isn't the case, then the author will have a work or two that yields bitter hatred, even among his or her most devoted readers (for example, this seems to happen a lot with Philip Roth). With Colson Whitehead, I assumed Apex Hides the Hurt fell into the latter category. With the exception of Zone One, I've now read his entire fiction bibliography, and if possible, I hope to have all of his works read by the end of the year. Apex Hides the Hurt, published in 2006, never seems to get any attention, even among Whitehead's biggest fans and patrons. I never assumed it was bad, but rather I assumed it wasn't as good as the previous and subsequent novels. Last week, I went to check out my local library, something I had not done since moving to a new neighborhood at the end of April. The selection is small, but I found a copy of Apex and decided to see what it was all about. I'm now perplexed as to why this book isn't as lauded as The Intuitionist or Sag Harbor. Whitehead's works deal with racial and sociological issues blended with specific ideas: elevator repair, the folk tales of John Henry, and the autobiographical imagining of black residents of Sag Harbor in the 1980s. Apex uses marketing, small-town politics, and distinct personalities to explore the ideas of integrity, motives, and varying levels of identity. I loved the book, and I'm hoping that this essay will be a small addition in giving an unappreciated work some overdue attention.

The narrator is an unnamed nomenclature consultant with a legendary track record for giving new products imaginative, attention-grabbing names. This isn't just a knack, but rather an almost sixth sense, combined with hard work and an innate understanding of how a name can make or break a product. As it's described in the opening paragraph:

"He came up with the names. They were good times. He came up with the names and like any good parent he knocked them around to teach them life lessons. He bent the to see if they'd break, he dragged them behind cars by heavy metal chains, he exposed them to high temperatures for extended periods of time. Sometimes consonants broke off and left angry vowels on the laboratory tables. How else was he to know if they were ready for what the world had in store for them (Whitehead 3)?"

He walks with a pronounced limp and has recently left his company (these points are mentioned right away, but the full details are revealed as the novel progresses). He's asked to visit a small town called Winthrop to mediate their proposal to rename the area, and interacts with three people with three different ideas. Lucky Aberdeen, a wealthy software CEO who has returned to the area (along with the hope of reviving it as a tech community), wants the town branded as New Prospera, a revitalized, almost Utopian designation. Regina Goode, the black mayor, has her heart set on Freedom, which the consultant finds unimaginative until he learns more about the black founds of the town. And Albie Winthrop, the namesake of the barbed wire producers who came before him, thinks his family name should remain. With this set-up, one would expect a tale of intense battles and double-crosses. While Whitehead does pepper the text with the occasional revelation, the consultant engages in relatively tame conversations with these three key citizens. While staying at the Winthrop Hotel, he quickly acquires a couple of nemeses--a very insistent housekeeper and a gruff bartender. These interactions are played very humorously, rendering the actual conversations about the town name more meaningful and thoughtful. There are no small town stereotypes at play, but rather some careful observations about how coming from a long line of family members in such a place can have an effect on one's identity. The bartender is one of the best examples of this:

"The bartender ran his cloth across nonexistent stains on glasses, lipstick that had not remained and specks that had not lingered. A streak of gray started at his forehead and fanned out into his Afro in a curly wedge, an ancient and hardwired pattern, in his genes. He watched the man wipe glass, hold up glass to the light to consider his handiwork. The day the bartender discovered that white spray in the mirror, as he was about to perform the daily trimming of his muttonchops, he knew he had become his grandfather, that he was truly his father's son beyond what the surname said. It was hard not to notice that the bartender had some old-school muttonchops, real daguerreotype shit, something to aspire to (Whitehead 21)."

The titular Apex is a fictional bandage that comes in many different color tones to serve a diverse population, and remains the best name created by the consultant. His history of working with the brand manages to tie together all of the plot themes while remaining its own, original story. As he does in his other works, Whitehead includes some factual history (namely Johnson & Johnson's Band-Aid) that goes along with the fictional story. By creating a perfect name for a revolutionary medical aid, complex sociology and personal history come into play. The actual bandage serves as a key plot point, and the Apex brand makes an unassumed link to Winthrop's history, being founded by black settlers and quickly being overtaken by whites.

"The whiz kid said, You manufacture this thing and call it flesh. It belongs to another race. I have different ideas about what color flesh is, he told them. We come in colors. We come in many colors. And we want to see ourselves when we look down at ourselves, our arms and legs. Around the table the men listened, and soon afterward they got to work. Somebody give this guy a raise.
At Ogilvy and Myrtle they knew the neighborhoods, some block by block, and they knew the hues of the people who lived there. They knew the cities and the colors of their mayors. They knew the colors of clientele and zip codes and could ship boxes accordingly.
They devised thirty hues originally, later knocked them down to twenty after research determined a zone of comfort. It didn't have to be perfect, just not too insulting (Whitehead 88-89)."

Whitehead's writing is full of keen observations, and sometimes he doesn't need to carefully weave them into the text; they need to be out in the open. The consultant visits with Albie Winthrop, a divorced, troubled man seeking to maintain the town's original name. He's lost almost everything, and he wants to hold on to a remaining strip of dignity. The two men went to the same college, an elite institution that forms the basis of a perceived bond on Albie's part. The consultant observes as an aside:

"He had found, in his life, that it was always a good policy to flee when white people felt compelled to inform you about their black friend, or black acquaintance, or black person they saw on the street that morning. There were many reasons to flee, but in this case the pertinent one was that the reference was intended to signal growing camaraderie (Whitehead 80-81)."

When he finds out the original name of the town was supposed to be Freedom, he deplores the blandness and ties it into overused names in products. He later learns the true meaning of the name, but offers a quick, witty analysis.

"Freedom. He whistled. If he'd offered up Freedom in a meeting, he'd have been run out of town, his colleagues in full jibber behind him, waving torches. It was like something from the B-GON days, an artifact of the most pained and witless nomenclature. Roach B-GON, Rat B-GON. Hope B-GON. Freedom was so defiantly unimaginative as to approach a kind of moral weakness (Whitehead 83)."

Even using a fictional town as the basis of the story, Whitehead manages to explore issues and normally disregarded facets of the areas around us. As the town history is revealed, the consultant begins to appreciate it. This isn't any sappy, sentimental warming of an otherwise calculating businessman, but a touching look at roots. In its fictional setting, it almost forces the reader to imagine his or her neighborhood and the complex histories behind it.

"[The Mayor] didn't speak for the rest of the ride to the hotel, leaving his eyes to jump from sign to sign. Winthrop's Virginias and Oaks were well within character for someone hungering after the connotations of the eastern establishment, he decided. Want to import the coast to the prairie? You have to learn how to be just as dull, name by name. Whereas the black settlers had different marketing priorities. Hope crossed Liberty, past the intersection of Salvation. Better than naming the streets after what they knew before they came here. Take Kidnap to the end, make a left on Torture, keep on 'til you get to Lynch. Follow the lights 'til you get to Genocide and stop at the dead end (Whitehead 128)."

I did a quick skim of the Apex Hides the Hurt Wikipedia page, and some of the criticisms levied against it could be valid. Whitehead has some obvious metaphors (a narrator renowned for clever names has no name of his own), and the revelation about the actual Apex bandage can be seen coming roughly halfway through the novel. There are a couple potential romances presented to the consultant, but nothing materializes. However, as I'm wont to point out in other cases, nothing Whitehead does is gimmicky. He's not fishing for any "gotcha" or "ah ha" moments, but lets them progress naturally. And the biggest revelation never comes (this might be a bit of a spoiler, but it has to do with the final vote on the naming rights of the town). The book was published right before the explosion of social media, and even then, marketing was dominating every aspect of our lives, so much that the battle over a town's name seems almost quaint, especially today. At my bookstore, I recently saw a book about how neuroscience and brain studies can be used for effective marketing, and it scared me to no end. Whitehead is truly deserving of the title "cultural commentator," and he does this in his fiction in fantastic ways. He's not exploiting any trends, but rather uses contemporary climates that end up having timeless things to say about daily life and interactions. Maybe in due time this book will get more attention, but for now, if this truly is Whitehead's "lesser work," that only speaks volumes of his artistry. This would probably be hailed as a masterpiece by other novelists, even though I'd call it just a very, very good book. His other novels border on masterpieces. This is a work that's entertaining, provoking, and one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I've had lately.

Work Cited:
Whitehead, Colson. Apex Hides the Hurt. Copyright 2006 by Colson Whitehead.

Summer Times: Colson Whitehead's "Sag Harbor"

NOTE: Some of the cited passages are NSFW.

I'm participating in a new book club, organized by one of my co-workers. I volunteered to host the July session, with the selection being Colson Whitehead's 2009 novel Sag Harbor. Before I get into the book itself, the book club meeting gently reinforced the fact that literary critics, whether of the armchair or professional variety, can stumble on intentions and do the occasional misreading. The most recent example is Janet Maslin's misreading of Patrick Somerville's This Bright River, which led the author to pen his own response, the much-shared "Thank You For Killing My Novel." When I was in college, I wrote several pages' worth of criticism on a short story (I've forgotten which one), only to be called to my professor's office to be told I had missed a key element of the plot, one so big that it rendered my paper completely wrong. As my stomach clenched, the professor smiled and offered me a chance to rewrite it. He told me a story about his first year of teaching: he was explaining a text to a full lecture hall, and a student raised his hand and said "I hate to interrupt, but that's not what happened in the book." The professor told me how embarrassed he was when he realized his student was right, that he had truly gaffed on the plot. So where am I going with this? I'll explain in more detail as I get into Sag Harbor's intricacies, but my opening statement to the book club was eventually proven to be the opposite of Whitehead's most likely intentions.

The novel tells the story of Benji, a black teenager who spends his summers at his family's home in Sag Harbor. His parents normally come on the weekends, giving him and his brother free reign during the week. It's 1985, Benji is fifteen years old, and he's determined to reinvent his image and personality. During the school year, he's one of the few black students at his prep school, but during the summer, he's part of a larger group of well-to-do black vacationers in the area. His friends are a cast of characters with unique personalities, but with traits that anyone can remember from their high school days: Marcus tends to get left behind on group outings; Randy calls shots based on the fact that he has a car; NP (with a hilarious nickname origin that would be too much to spoil here) grandly exaggerates his exploits; and so on. Benji observes the (mis)adventures and monotony of a long summer, but what seems like the foundation for a typical coming of age novel is rather a platform for careful details of personalities and teenage yearnings without any true dramatic climaxes or "payoffs." However, Whitehead's writing turns the mundane into fascinating studies of interactions. Through Benji's narration, the stories behind the actions and personalities of him and his friends become compelling. A good example is the youthful obsession with complex ritual handshakes:

"Yes, the handshakes were out, shaming me with their permutations and slippery routines. Slam, grip, flutter, snap. Or was it slam, flutter, grip, snap? I was all thumbs when it came to shakes. Devised in the underground soul laboratories of Harlem, pounded out in the blacker-than-thou sweatshops of the South Bronx, the new handshakes always had me faltering in embarrassment. Like this? No, you didn't stick to the landing: the judges give it 4.6 (Whitehead 43)."

Experimentation with language is also carefully, hilariously rendered:

"I said 'Shut up, bitch.' I'd been experimenting with 'bitch,' trying it out every couple of days. Going well so far, from the response (Whitehead 93)."

"You could also preface things with a throat-clearing 'You fuckin',' as in 'You fuckin' Cha-Ka from Land Of the Lost-lookin' motherfucker,' directed at Bobby, for example, who had light brown skin, light brown hair, and indeed shared these characteristics with the hominid sidekick on the Saturday morning adventure show Land Of the Lost. 'You fuckin'' acted as a rhetorical pause, allowing the speaker a few extra seconds to pluck some splendid modifier out of the invective ether, and giving the listener a chance to gird himself for the top-notch put-down/splendid imagery to follow (Whitehead 41-42)."

Benji and his brother Reggie survive during the week by working at an ice cream parlor and Burger King, respectively (Whitehead is spot-on in his descriptions of the drudgery and nastiness of summertime food counter work). The rest of the time is spent awaiting the parental visits on the weekends and trying to cram as much activity into the end of the week as possible. Some of these are specific (Benji accidentally gets shot in the eye during a BB gun war), and sometimes these are general. Throughout, Whitehead never wanes in at least a succinct sociological overview of the happenings, and even with mentions of The Cosby Show and New Coke, the events aren't exclusive to Benji's 1985. The teenage male dynamics can apply to almost any era or demographic.

"Summers we brawled. We were hungry for slight, for provocations big and small, and when one didn't appear, we trumped up charges. Turf. The more whole you were, the more turf you had. You could tolerate the occasional trespass. But if you had so little turf that you felt like you barely had any air? You told someone they had crossed a line they didn't know existed. Then you punched them in the face.
The first equations of manhood. Generally you punched someone younger and smaller. Common sense. A more even match was sometimes unavoidable. The standard fight was brief and awkward. A quick blow to the face sent you into your favorite stance, one that cannot be found in any boxing primer in the land, or sent you searching after a cherished martial-arts movie pose, Praying Mantis, Turtle Position (Whitehead 136)."

So where did my book club steer me in the right direction? Based on the other Whitehead novels I've read (The Intuitionist and John Henry Days), I was expecting, either metaphorically or explicitly, more explorations on racial issues, and Whitehead does touch upon these, but not in a way that makes them the driving forces of the novel. My original complaint was that Whitehead would present a racial or sociological issue, and then move on to another plot point. However, as I've come to realize: Benji is fifteen years old. Almost no fifteen year old has the capacity to ruminate on issues except on a surface level. Therefore, Whitehead has made Benji one of the most realistic teen characters in recent fiction. As a black citizen, he's obviously aware and sensitive to cultural issues, but his main fascinations are with sex, avoiding boredom, and how he's perceived to others. That's not to say that Benji's narration isn't touching or without complexities. His relationship with his father is fraught with tension. His father is tough, teaching Benji how to stand up for himself in the face of racism, but also excessively intense, getting into fierce arguments with his wife about, of all things, the purchase of the wrong kind of paper plates. Benji has a chance encounter with his older sister, a beautifully rendered scene that, while fleeting, is Benji's biggest "coming of age" moment, when he realizes his sister has no plans to visit the house while she's in town. Even followed up later by Benji's first experience being alone with a girl, the meeting with Elena holds the most emotional weight.

"'What are you doing here? When did you get out?'
'I just popped in for the weekend,' she said. 'I'm visiting Derek.'
Bobby checked out her friend, raising a skeptical eyebrow.
I said, 'Oh, I didn't know.'
'It was a last-minute thing.'
'When are you coming over? 'Cause I work--' I began to say. Because I didn't want to miss her.
'I'm probably not going to have time to make it over there,' she said. 'Probably. It's just a quick visit.'
'Oh. (Whitehead 237)'"

Being a series of small and less-small moments, Sag Harbor is a challenge to discuss and write about without resorting to the basic recaps of the various scenes. However, its simplicity is very deceptive, since every action has a direct link to either Benji's emotions and makeup or Sag Harbor's citizens and demographics. Its creation doesn't have the complicated setups of Whitehead's first two novels, but that doesn't mean its lacking; the novel asks some of the same questions in a different format. I tend to be wary of books or films that have a "coming of age" angle, since this is normally a fancy way of saying a given character loses his or her innocence/virginity/combination of the two. However, Benji remains relatively untouched by the end of the summer, despite some new understandings and experiences. Whitehead is smart enough to show that a single summer, despite its literary potential, isn't enough to truly change someone. Benji still has a lot of teen years left, as well as adulthood, and his keen observations are more for the reader's sake than his own. Sag Harbor also continues with what Whitehead occasionally did in John Henry Days, blending a literary work with genuine hilarity. That's a very rare balance, since comical writing is not an easy task. However, this work manages to combine hilarity, genuinely moving discoveries, and breezy summertime happenings into a work with fascinating cultural depictions. Whitehead is one of the most fantastically diverse writers working today, not out of a need to reinvent himself, but out of his ability to explore a myriad of topics in wildly different formats.

Work Cited:
Whitehead, Colson. Sag Harbor. Copyright 2009 by Colson Whitehead.

Stamping Grounds: Colson Whitehead's "John Henry Days"

Last year, I was highly satisfied with a reading of 1999's The Intuitionist, my first introduction to the work of Colson Whitehead. His fantastical account of warring elevator inspectors was a metaphorical exploration of American race relationships, bureaucratic hypocrisy, and gender identifications, all packaged into a compelling mystery novel. Since then, I've read quite a bit of his excellent book reviews and essays, as well as following his Twitter feed (@colsonwhitehead), which happens to be one of the most entertaining ones I've encountered, a good combination of poetic riffs and genuinely insightful commentaries. Recently, I made time to read his second novel, John Henry Days, thereby continuing my accidental trend of reading his novels chronologically. Published in 2001, the novel is a sort of combination of the above traits. It's a mix of contemporary and older American landscapes and values, along with more explicit looks at racial identity, this time with the metaphorical aspects being more sly. Also, like Whitehead's nonfiction writings, it's another careful balance of the serious and the comical.

In Talcott, West Virginia, various people begin to assemble for the first annual John Henry Days Festival, a celebration of the mythical folk hero and an official unveiling of a U.S. Postal Service stamp commemorating American folklore. Among the people are: J. Sutter, a black journalist from Manhattan who is covering the event for a travel website, as well as trying to set a press junket attendance record; J.'s fellow journalists writing for other publications; Pamela, a chain-smoking young woman who inherited a massive collection of John Henry memorabilia from her father; a nebbish stamp collector named Alphonse Miggs; and a collection of P.R. representatives, local motel owners, and small town politicians. Alternating chapters provide an extensive fictionalized account of the John Henry story, as well as details about how the myth permeated American society through song, academia, becoming a story that takes on almost religious acceptance.

J. Sutter is a career journalist, navigating a world of banquets, release parties, and deadlines. He collects receipts to falsely inflate his expense accounts, wears free clothes accumulated at fashion junkets, and lives for free buffets and food spreads. The John Henry Days assignment isn't glamorous, but he views it as a job. However, he is slightly worried about being a black man in a small Southern town, and has a tendency to project his own stereotypes on the local people. One might be tempted to categorize J. as "disaffected," (this adjective appears on the paperback's plot description) but weary is probably more appropriate. He has seen everything in the world of journalism, and even the novelty of web-based writing is taken in stride. In describing J., Whitehead explores the character's personality, and also manages to be ahead of his time in depicting the internet as just another source of information.

"J. doesn't feel like explaining the web; this guy probably thinks a laptop is some new kind of banjo. Lucien set it up. J. hasn't worked for the web before but knew it was only a matter of time: new media is welfare for the middle class. A year ago the web didn't exist, and now J. has several hitherto unemployable acquaintances who were now picking up steady paychecks because of it. Fewer people are home in the afternoon eager to discuss what transpires on talk shows and cartoons and this means people are working. It was only a matter of time before those errant corporate dollars blew his way. He attracts that kind of weather (Whitehead 19)."

His interactions with the other members of the press are rendered effectively; they aren't friends or co-workers, but linked together through similar assignments. His meetings with Pamela follow an expected trajectory, from initial irritation to friendly acceptance to potential romantic feelings. Upon reflection, J. and Pamela, for all of the past and present details of their lives, are not written for the reader to gain a complete understanding of them. They develop nicely, but the novel leaves their future open-ended. However, Whitehead provides them with enough depth to be realistic. Pamela, for example, is not thrilled about being at the festival; she's merely hoping to rid herself of her father's John Henry collection, and more problems are boiling below her surface.

"Haunted by stuff. Hunched over ramen, in the same clothes she'd worn for days, she felt dazed. She was on the patch. She was off the patch. She was on the gum and smoking in between. She didn't go out that much, partly because she couldn't afford to, partly because going out did nothing for her mood. Her friends understood, her friends told her it was natural. It was part of the grieving process. Therapy diffuses: everyone knew the cant, the correct diagnosis. It was natural. It had nothing to do with her father, however, it had to do with John Henry, the original sheet music ballads, railroad hammers, spikes and bits, playbills from the Broadway production, statues of the man and speculative paintings (Whitehead 45)."

The beauty of John Henry Days lies in Whitehead's depictions of American history. He explores the world of songwriters and the prevalence of John Henry as a time-honored song subject. Pages are devoted to the plight of singer Paul Robeson, who played John Henry onstage. Yet the fictionalized stories of John Henry, while based on American mythology as opposed to the more factual histories of the song business and the story of Robeson, are the most striking and real. Internet research hints to the very real possibility of John Henry being based on an actual black steel driver; like much of contemporary mythology and legend, the truth has been obscured through time, conflicting accounts, and letting the story stand for its own morality and meanings. Whitehead takes these ideas and crafts them into a tale that draws on the humanity of John Henry, the troubles of being a black man in the 1800s, and thereby highlighting the story in ways that are not always apparent.

"John Henry turned to bed early that night. He had never been beaten by another man's hammer but pride is a sin. He took his rest. The payday carousing tried to keep him awake but he willed himself to sleep and dreamed of the contest as a fistfight between the white man and the black man over the fill of the western cut. The dead watched the contest from beneath the rock. He saw through their eyes staring up at himself as he crushed the face of the white man. He did not need his hammer for that (Whitehead 147)."



"If John Henry wanted he could have put faces to the voices but he did not try. He knew all the men. Some were friends. Some were enemies. It did not matter where they stood with him as their talk swirled into one talk about the contest. They laid bets on whether a man could beat a machine. All of their wagers on John Henry before this time were rehearsals for this day. One voice came to him saying it was impossible. Another voice said John Henry was no kind of man like you and me, but a demon and no machine was going to stop him (Whitehead 384)."

John Henry Days is not without its occasional misstep. Aside from J. the other journalists, while occasionally given strong dialogues and important later scenes, sometimes become grating and serve more as obvious personality types instead of true characters. The details of Alphonse Miggs, the seemingly henpecked stamp collector, are incredibly compelling, yet his true worth to the novel almost becomes an aside, rather than a rewarding payoff. However, for a second novel, Whitehead manages to expand on the themes and motifs that made The Intuitionist such a force. In addition to fictionalizing the real questions of race relations, Whitehead has a gift for his take on various settings. The Intuitionist was written in a city that could have easily been alive in the past or set in the future. In John Henry Days, race and settings, both contemporary and historical, are shown in a classic novel format. These books are excellent beginnings and foundations for Zone One, his forthcoming novel set during a zombie apocalypse. I've long disdained the cultural fascination with zombie stories, but if Whitehead can take well-discussed issues and render them unique, I'm sure my reaction to that work will be the same.

Work Cited:
Whitehead, Colson. John Henry Days. Copyright 2001 by Colson Whitehead.

Early Risings

Whenever I read books by a new author (new in terms of my readings, not recent debuts), it's rare that I start at the very beginning. Last year, a close friend of mine was very excited about the publication of Colson Whitehead's Sag Harbor, and in talking to me about his canon, gave me an excellent endorsement of Whitehead's 1999 debut novel The Intuitionist. Like any good word-of-mouth description, my friend's synopsis was an excellent sketch, but left so much more to be discovered. The author's name has been in my head and in my notes for quite some time, and I mention the early recommendation to give credit where it's due. Given Whitehead's literary esteem, I would have started reading his works eventually, but perhaps those readings would have been delayed without my friend's enthusiasm. After reading an enjoyable interview between Whitehead and Rob Spillman in the 10th Anniversary issue of Tin House magazine, I decided to not wait any longer.

The Intuitionist details the politics and conspiracies of two vastly different groups of elevator inspectors in an unnamed city (if not New York, then crafted as such), in an unnamed time (this is more vague, but the descriptions have the aura of the post-World War II era). The Empiricist inspect elevators with standard, by-the-book methods; The Intuitionists use emotions, intuition, and deep meditation in their inspections. As the book hints, the Intuitionists have a higher accuracy rate, but are still looked down upon by the Empiricists. Lila Mae Watson is the first black female Intuitionist in the department, and her demeanor and devotion to her job suggests nothing metaphysical or out of the ordinary. However, a glimpse into her mind as she inspects an elevator shows the curious, tangible thought process that goes into such a mental form of inspection.

"Everyone has their own set of genies. Depends on how your brain works. Lila Mae has always had a thing for geometric forms. As the elevator reaches the fifth floor landing, an orange octagon cartwheels into her mind's frame. It hops up and down, incongruous with the annular aggression of the red spike. Cubes and parallelograms emerge around the eighth floor, but they're satisfied with half-hearted little jigs and don't disrupt the proceedings like the mischievous orange octagons (Whitehead 6)."

An elevator inspected by Lila Mae crashes, leading to immediate backlash against the Intuitionist faction, especially since it's an election year for the Elevator Guild. Lila Mae knows that she inspected the elevator properly, leading to the immediate assumption that the faulty elevator was sabotaged. Her apartment is broken into and searched, and she has to go into brief hiding in an Intuitionist safe house. The intention of clearing her name eventually turns into several different mysteries, including the search for notes and blueprints regarding the "black box," a theoretically "perfect" elevator designed by the late James Fulton, the founder of the Intuitionist movement. Lila Mae seems to take every new turn in stride, since her makeup suggests a woman not easily shocked or broken down. As Whitehead says in his interview with Spillman:

"With The Intuitionist I am confined by the character of the book and [Lila] Mae's disposition--she's sour and repressed, so she's not going to be cracking a lot of jokes."

This disposition is understandable. Despite being completely professional, intelligent, and a valued elevator inspector, Lila Mae experiences a lot of discrimination. She's the first black female Intuitionist, thereby representing three minorities in the scope of the novel. Whether blatant or implied, she can't seem to escape even the most mild criticisms or racial implications.

"'I think I remember you,' Mrs. Rogers says flatly, nodding her head. 'There never been too many of us around here, who weren't scrubbing floors or picking up, that is. Yes, I remember you. I remember you because you were the only colored gal around here who didn't work here (Whitehead 92)."




The above quote is a hint to the suggested time period, with the adjective "colored" being used frequently. The Intuitionist is partly historical, with the slightest dash of science fiction, but is at heart a novel about race relations. A reader would not be faulted for thinking that, if Lila Mae were a white male, the vast majority of her problems would be minimized. She's not the only one dealing with racism. Pompey, the only other black Intuitionist, has internalized the racism, and it manifests itself in downright ludicrous thoughts.

"No caramel soda, no prune juice, and definitely no coffee: Pompey won't drink anything darker than his skin, for fear of becoming darker than he already is. As if his skin were a stain that could worsen, steep and saturate into Hell's Black (Whitehead 87)."

The politics of the Elevator Guild are also race-driven, with the leaders putting up the front of being supportive of the black community when they're anything but. In the search for the "black box," Chancre, the Empiricist Guild leader, makes his beliefs explicit to Lila Mae. In this quote, Whitehead could very well be encapsulating the negative history of American politics and race relations:

"Chancre pauses a moment, savoring, responds: 'Do your job. Serve the Department. Reed's got you running around looking for Fulton's little box--well, if you happen to find it, you give it to us. What good is it going to do them in the long run? They may sway some of the undecideds, but the Empricists have always been the party of the Elevator Inspectors Guild, and always will be. You believe what they tell you and think that Lever [an Intuitionist] and them are 'friends of the colored people' or some such, but they're the same as anyone else (Whitehead 115-116).'"

While greatly different in style and subject matter, The Intuitionist reminded me of Jonathan Lethem's Gun, With Occasional Music. In both novels, the writers created distinct mashings of genres and time, all housed in the style of standard mystery novels. However, the mystery aspect of the books is intended to be a compliment rather than the main plot. Both Whithead and Lethem are scholars of media and pop culture, and in the midst of originality provide great homages to past writers in a variety of genres. Lethem was obviously inspired by the mysteries of Raymond Chandler; in Lila Mae Watson, Whitehead creates a woman who would be very much at home in a private eye story, not blinking at each new turn. Despite her lack of explicit confrontations, she doesn't accept any discrimination. She's mentally superior to the people who look down on her.

The elevator metaphors are obvious in The Intuitionist, the notions of rising and falling, especially in relation to black American history. However, Whitehead doesn't rely solely on these metaphors. Much like the fiction of Nella Larsen, the fictionalized friction isn't different from reality.

Work Cited:
Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist. Copyright 1999 by Colson Whitehead.