... a strikingly original and polished début ... seizes upon an unsung wonder in our midst, the elevator, and sings its history, its technology, its romance, adding to the novelist’s solid research a scintillating pinch of sci-fi fantasy ... Whitehead unfolds his raddled undercity with the terse poetry and numinous dignity of the early Malamud. The prose is a gas, bubbly, clean, often funny in its bursts of mock-mandarin social exposition ... Whitehead can try too hard, but generally his writing does what writing should do; it refreshes our sense of the world.
... ingenious and starkly original ... While he does fall back on the conventions of the genre (at one point, an overzealous reporter gets his fingers broken by thugs), he uses them mainly as narrative scaffolding for what emerges as his real project -- an ambitious, wide-ranging exploration of racial struggle and the dynamics of social progress. The idea of physical elevation, of course, has obvious metaphorical significance in this context, and Whitehead makes much of it, framing his subject as a contest between warring conceptions of how best to lift people from one level of being to the next. And since any attempt to replace 'the robust edifices of the old order' is likely to spawn a thicket of deceptions and betrayals, his use of the film noir idiom proves cunningly apt ... Ultimately, I'm not sure Whitehead is in full control of the many thematic elements he has unleashed in this dense and sometimes difficult book. Toward the end, one can sense Whitehead's ambition straining against the seams of the pulp fiction story he's chosen to contain it. He's obviously trying to do for second-generation elevator transport what Thomas Pynchon did for alternative mail delivery in The Crying of Lot 49 ...That's a tall order, but the fact that Whitehead has succeeded as well as he has is news worth spreading. Literary reputations may not always rise and fall as predictably as elevators, but if there's any justice in the world of fiction, Colson Whitehead's should be heading toward the upper floors.
... the most innovative, creative, and visionary new novel in a few years ... A stunning contemplation on race, The Intuitionist brings to mind the strength of Ralph Ellison and the quirky brilliance of Thomas Pynchon ... what makes The Intuitionist so darn good is the way Whitehead balances his concerns. By turns literate, thrilling, comic, and poignant, Whitehead lifts readers into this strange world and never allows identity politics to turn the book into an ideological jag. His prose pulses across the page, seamlessly jumping characters, time, style, and events. Whether with one-word thoughts or complex, descriptive sentences, Whitehead draws readers into this fantastic world of verticality and races us to the top.
... marks the arrival of a dazzling new voice in American fiction. Original, smart, magical -- Whitehead's achievement ranks alongside Catch-22,V.The Bluest Eye and other groundbreaking first novels. And the comparison to these three books is apt: Whitehead shares Heller's sense of the absurd, Pynchon's operatic expansiveness and Morrison's deconstruction of race and racism ... There are no false notes, no sophomoric stumbles or indulgences. Just lucid, infectious writing, compelling characters and situations, even-handed social commentary and a gripping story ... Whitehead is the real thing: a writer of humor, imaginative prowess and fierce intelligence who understands both the highbrow novel of ideas and the lowbrow novel of suspense ... Most impressive of all, Whitehead creates a completely believable fictional universe that's frighteningly familiar yet also slightly surreal and otherworldly ... Whitehead has emerged as one of the most promising novelists of his generation.
Whitehead’s debut novel can claim a literary lineage that includes Orwell, Ellison, Vonnegut, and Pynchon, yet it is resoundingly original ... The story is mesmerizing, but it is Whitehead’s shrewd and sardonic humor and agile explications of the insidiousness of racism and the eternal conflict between the material and the spiritual that make this such a trenchant and accomplished novel.
... remarkable ... peeling back the layers reveals a book drenched in allegory that works on a multitude of different levels ... Part of the success of this book is Whitehead's ability to give the story a riveting sense of place ... It's as if the revelation of 'vertical transport' is the only way to raise one's soul above these earthly and man-made portents.
... submerges readers in a political world where the squabbles are familiar, even if the territory isn’t ... Given my overexposure to poetry in my youth, I think the importance of elevators to Lila Mae and everyone else in The Intuitionist is a necessary buy-in to best appreciate how the story unfolds. The elevator world is so silkily incorporated into Whitehead’s unnamed city, with its appropriately dark corners and it’s hard to beat as a symbol of progress.
... meaty and mythic ... Whitehead has created a self-contained universe in this novel, complete with its own mythology and history (re-created at length in the course of the narrative), and it is to his credit that he is able to weave in a meditation on race. He has a completely original story to tell, and he tells it well, successfully intertwining multiple plot lines and keeping his reader intrigued from the outset.
A dizzyingly-high-concept debut of genuine originality, despite its indebtedness to a specific source, ironically echoes and amusingly inverts Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man ... a deftly plotted mystery and quest tale that’s also a teasing intellectual adventure ... Whitehead skillfully orchestrates these noirish particulars together with an enormity of technical-mechanical detail and resonant meditations on social and racial issues, bringing all into a many-leveled narrative equally effective as detective story and philosophical novel. Ralph Ellison would be proud.
