Monday, May 12, 2008
"The Intuitionist" author Colson Whitehead talks about elevator codebooks, too many "Good Times" jokes and the lost legacy of the black intellectual novel
Jan 12, 1999 | Colson Whitehead's bewitching first novel, "The Intuitionist," is certainly not autobiographical. A Manhattan native and Harvard graduate who went to work as an editorial assistant at the Village Voice and eventually became that paper's TV critic, Whitehead has never inspected an elevator or belonged to an old-time union, like Lila Mae Watson, the beleaguered heroine of his book. Perhaps it was his early penchant for Stephen King novels that gave Whitehead's fiction a decidedly imaginative bent. In that case, readers have more to thank King for than several million sleepless nights.
"The Intuitionist" is a stylish, highly original mix of detective story, Borgesian metaphysical puzzle and portrait of pre-Civil Rights race relations, set in a place almost, but not quite, like New York City. Its soft-spoken author -- still nervous enough about publishing his first book that he glanced away after spotting a stack of fresh copies at a local bookstore -- recently stopped by to talk with Salon.
When did you decide that you wanted to be a novelist?
When I was a kid. I read Stephen King and I thought he was really cool. I wanted to write novels with monsters in them. It was kind of funny, this year, to see the rediscovery of Stephen King.
Did you learn things from being a TV critic that helped?
I think I got a lot of stuff out of my system. I learned some good habits from having to produce every other week and trying to make it fresh. Village Voice style back then encouraged the first-person -- that sort of me-me-me stuff -- and I worked through various preoccupations with pop culture. Some of the pieces were very satirical and over-the-top, and I would go overboard sometimes and think, "Oh, that didn't work very well," so I'd come back with something better. You can't just make '70s references all the time. After the 10th "Good Times" joke, it's not fresh.
There's a lot of people who need to learn that. I don't know if I'd want to give them all TV columns to get them over it. Where did the idea for the elevator inspector in the "The Intuitionist" come from?
My whole life I've seen those elevator inspection certificates. I'd go to school, when I was a kid, and come back and the person had been there, the exact same guy for 10 years. The elevator seemed perfectly fine, so what'd he do? I was thinking about what would make a funny detective story. Well, why not put this person in a situation where he actually has to apply his esoteric skills to a straightforward mystery? But then I had to actually make up what kinds of skills he had, and it became all about elevators and not so much this chase-the-McGuffin sort of story.
Did you do a lot of research into elevators?
Yeah, I just went to the library. Sadly for me, a lot of it was reference, so I had to troop around. But, yeah, there's engineering manuals, there's state guidebooks, actual code books of elevator inspection. They tell you what violation 3.04a(d) is, whatever.
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