5. The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead

[rydra_wong]

There are books you can't put down, and then there are books you put down a third of the way through so that you can run to the computer and start ordering more books by the same author. The Intuitionist is that good

Comments

[coffeeandink]

There are books you can't put down, and then there are books you put down a third of the way through so that you can run to the computer and start ordering more books by the same author.

Yay! You, too? I put a library hold on John Henry Days because I was trying to be good about spending money and then ended up buying The Colossus of New York and Apex Heals the Hurt anyway, because I just couldn't wait.

[rydra_wong]

Oh, man, the prose style. So good.

Btw, if you've ever written any posts on Whitehead, I'd love links ...

*looks hopeful*

[coffeeandink]

I haven't written it up yet (I am *so* behind on writing up my reading, it's disgraceful), but there are some during-read mentions here and here (with people elaborating in comments).

[rydra_wong]

Eeeeeee, thank you!

*runs to read*

[carenejeans]

This book sounds right up my alley!

So... I went to check it out and clicked on a review of Whitehead's second book, John Henry Days (because that sounded intriguing too). Not to hijack your post here, but the review -- by Jonathan "Too Cool For Oprah" Franzen -- made me livid. So of course I have to share that fun feeling

[carenejeans]

I wonder what Colson made of a review like that?

Erm, I meant Whitehead. We're not on a first-name basis! *goes for more coffee*

[rydra_wong]

That's ... that's ... what?

Well, it does at least save me from ever spending money on one of Franzen's books.

I mean, god knows there are instances where male authors seem to be writing female protagonists as their fantasy sex objects *coughHeinleincough*. But that's clearly not the case with The Intuitionist.

so, fairly or not, I found myself wishing that Whitehead had written about a man.

Because writing about a man is the default, normal state of affairs, of course. No need to speculate about an author's "unappetizing" motives for doing that ...

*headdesks*

[carenejeans]

Because writing about a man is the default, normal state of affairs, of course.

Indeed. Because his very next paragraph starts:

"But all is forgiven now. Whitehead's new novel, ''John Henry Days,'' not only features a male protagonist, a young freelance journalist named J. Sutter, but cannily engages the interior crisis of manhood in present-day America."

[sanguinity]

The Intuitionist really, really didn't work for me. Maybe it went over my head. Or maybe, as an engineer, this intuitionists-good / empricists-bad thing bugged the living daylights out of me. Or both.

[rydra_wong]

Yep, I can see how that might bug you. But I felt the whole book was sufficiently far into the magic realism/fantasy register that it didn't bother me in that way - especially given that towards the end of the book, it was starting to look as if both sides were equally problematic, and had a fairly equal distribution of "bad guys".

[seekingferret]

I'm reading reviews of this book because I'm just starting it myself. I'm about 50 pages in and I have to say that so far it hasn't pinged my bad engineering antenna at all, which I think is because Intuitionism is validated empirically- the reason it has a following is because it produces 10% better accuracy than Empiricist inspection. But maybe this will change. I'll keep reading and we'll see.

[sanguinity]

:: Intuitionism is validated empirically ::

This, I did not know. It probably would have changed my understanding of the book.

There may have been other stuff going over my head, too. To my best recollection, there was nothing that struck me as going over my head, but sometimes things going over your head go high enough that you don't even hear a whooshing noise as they go by.

[cryptoxin]

I love this book! I'm so glad you posted about it -- I read it as soon as it came out in paperback, but I had nobody to talk about it with. I got two of my friends to read it -- one didn't like it and didn't finish it; the other liked it but didn't have much more to say and just nodded amiably at my enthusiastic babbling.

I remember being intrigued about how closely Whitehead was working within the terrain of what I think of as white boy postmodernism -- Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace (I'll also throw in Dean Motter's early work in comics, specifically Mister X). I couldn't readily connect it with the work of black writers where the term "postmodern" seems useful like Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison. I did see some attenuated affinities with Paul Beatty and Samuel Delaney (or, in retrospect because I hadn't read her yet, Zadie Smith) -- and I had the distinct feeling that The Intuitionist could be productively read alongside Ellison's Invisible Man. I have no idea which, if any, of these authors could be described

[rydra_wong]

I'd need to think more about your Walter Mosley comparison; I think I can see it, but it never would have occurred to me.

It may have been partly the effect of reading this pretty much back-to-back with Devil In A Blue Dress, but I was definitely struck by certain similarities in how they handle prose, something in the style - I haven't quite been able to put my finger on it yet (other than that both of them make me want to reread with a pencil and try to study what they're doing, word by word).

Of course there's a more obvious thematic link too, in the way both Devil In A Blue Dress and The Intuitionist deal with the issue of passing, and are both riffing on noir tropes while focusing on issues of race that classic noir elided.

It'll be interesting to see if the comparison seems to hold up as I read more of both authors.

[cryptoxin]

Huh, I was going more with a recoding-urban-space theme.

But I'm a lousy reader for this kind of discussion -- I'm totally engaged while I'm reading, but within a few months I've forgotten most of what I read. Including crucial plot points, central characters, and how the book ends -- I only retain fragments and impressions. For example, I didn't -- and actually still don't -- recall anything about passing in those books, even though it's always been a major theme of interest to me in terms of how it gets represented (I have a whole tl;dr riff in my head about how 20th c. passing narratives -- across literary & popular fiction, books & film -- entwined questions of race with gender & sexuality in all kinds of complicated ways).

(tangential rec if you haven't read her: Nella Larsen's novel(la)s, Quicksand and Passing -- she's associated with the Harlem Renaissance, and they're both amazing)

[jinian]

Yes, this book is amazing! I picked it up because of coffeeandink and loved it (despite my own empiricist leanings).