The Intuitionist

Blurb

The Intuitionist is a 1999 novel by Colson Whitehead. It falls broadly into speculative fiction.
The Intuitionist takes place in a city full of skyscrapers and other buildings requiring vertical transportation in the form of elevators. The time, never identified explicitly, is one when black people are called "colored" and integration is a current topic. The protagonist is Lila Mae Watson, an elevator inspector of the "Intuitionist" school. The Intuitionists practice an inspecting method by which they ride in an elevator and intuit the state of the elevator and its related systems. The competing school, the "Empiricists", insists upon traditional instrument-based verification of the condition of the elevator. Watson is the second black inspector and the first black female inspector in the city.
The book contains many images of lifting and falling, and the concept of the elevator, of "uplift", is perhaps a metaphor for racial progress.