"The Intuitionist" by Colson Whitehead *****

• Arts & Lecture Series 2014-15 author
• US author
• Originally published 1999
• Vocabulary:
• longevous:   long-lived, living to a great age
• Quotes:
• p.16..."But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring?"
• p.23..."...this is the true result of gathering integration: the replacement of sure violence with deferred sure violence."
• p.32..."Given obscenity's remarkable gallop into conversational speech, colorful epithets are to be expected in Lila Mae's address to the two strangers lurking about her apartment."
• p.37..."If we were to take a barbarian and place him, loincloth and all, before one of our magnificent cities, what would he feel?  He would feel fear, doubly; the fear of his powerlessness before our architectural excess and our fear, the thing that drives our architectural excess."
• p.43..."Weatherlessness is much more amenable to those in search of succor for bodily complaint, evoking timelessness and immortality, and soon the rich neurasthenic women from the Northeast's larger cities boarded planes to be free of the seasons and the proximity of their braying families, the cause of their disrepair."
• p.44..."A black gown is remarkably effective in conferring prestige on even the most rough-hewn of men."
• p.54..."Intuitionism, expounded on the gloom of the shaft ad how it does not merely echo the gloom inside every living creature, but duplicates it perfectly."
• p.65..."So complete is Number Eleven's ruin that there's nothing left but the sound of the crash,m rising in the shaft, a fall in opposite; a soul."
• p.77.."A slow hour passed, distracted by intermittent drops of moisture from above, as if the sky were conducting a feasibility study on the implications of rain."
• p.106..."This need to rise is biological, transcending the vague physics of department store architecture."
• p.151..."...horizontal thinking in a vertical world is the race's curse...".
• p.198..."She hadn't considered all the implications of the second elevation.  They will have to destroy this city once we deliver the black box.  The current bones will not accommodate the marrow of the device."...second coming?
• p.228..."Total freefall.  What happens when too many impossible events occur, when multiple redundancy is not enough."
• p.231..."What Intuitionism does not account for:  the catastrophic accident the elevator encounters at that unexpected moment on that quite ordinary ascent, the one who will reveal the device for what it truly is."  ......any deception
• p.255..."If it is the right time, she will give them the perfect elevator.  If it is not time she will send out more of Fulton's words to let the citizens know it is coming.  To let them prepare themselves for the second elevation."
• Review:   This debut novel is absolutely brilliant!  Whitehead's writing reminds me of Ayn Rand, of Millhauser and Auster.  Under the guise of a political battle amongst factions of the guild of elevator repairmen, Whitehouse is able to at one and the same time tell a gripping, suspenseful story and also offer up scathing commentary on racism, on human striving and lack thereof, of man's fear of lack of control, and the ups and downs, so to speak, of the human imagination.  At once witty, yet raging, at once absurd and profound.  I will definitely read more of this author's work!