Intuitioning

Still working my way through The Intuitionist, although now that I have taught my last high school class forever (knock on wood), it's looking like I'll have a lot more time to devote to reading. And thinking. Both of which I have been neglecting over the past two years.

I think the best way to describe the book is "fascinating." I'm fascinated by it. I wouldn't say I love it, necessarily, but I find it difficult to stop reading. And each time some new development that I hadn't anticipated occurs, I find myself thinking "Huh. Fascinating."

I am about 60 pages from the end, and I still haven't made up my mind whether the book is set in a futuristic alternative universe or a past alternative universe. Or, for that matter, in a concurrent alternative universe. Sometimes it seems to me that it must be unraveling in a futuristic world, and even though the racial issues in the book seem more strident and legally unacceptable than our current subtly crippling racial issues, it's possible to perceive our world moving backwards in the arena of race relations even as it moves forwards in other areas. But now that I'm actually writing about it, I think the book is actually the most effective when envisioned as happening right alongside our current world, in a New York City parallel to our own.

I think one could easily get swept up in divining metaphorical meanings for the fact that it is elevators that make this world go round, so I'll try not to do that. The only thing I'll say on the subject of Colson Whitehead's obsession with verticality is that it seems either oddly prescient or simply stirringly coincidental to have created a world that keeps its self-worth shored up in the height of buildings - of towers, if you will. Reading the book in a post-9/11 context gives it a new reverberation.

The only trouble I'm having with the book is a lack of a very clear portrait of anyone besides Lila Mae. Then again, that may be purposeful. After all, Lila Mae has just discovered that fuzziness and mystery were the keys to understanding the great Fulton, so keeping many of the supporting characters dimmed by the shadow of the buildings and machines they work with may have been a conscious move.

In any case, I'm looking forward to what the ending has to offer.