Colson Whitehead is a New York-inhabiting, literary nerd who’s fond of playing with big metaphors (see Apex Hides the Hurt) and uses a bunch of words that send me into Merriam-Webster. I think I’m developing a crush on him.

His debut novel, The Intuitionist, is set in a vaguely mid-20th-century New York fantasy world, where the Department of Elevator Inspectors holds the kind of power and prestige that breeds political corruption. His protagonist is independent, stoic Lila Mae Watson, the Department’s first black female elevator inspector. As if that’s not outsider enough, she also adheres to Intuitionism, the upstart school of elevator inspection that eschews the checklists and direct, rational observation of traditional Empiricism in favor of a more spiritual approach—listening intently to the elevator and sensing its well-being or lack thereof. Lila Mae demonstrates Intuitionism in a kind of synesthetic trance, perceiving an elevator’s movements and vibrations as vibrant colors and abstract geometry, and mysteriously drawing conclusions about its health. The method has never let her down—she has the best accuracy rate in the Department. But then an elevator in her jurisdiction meets with a dramatic freak accident (or is it?), and she is dragged from the margins into the rotten core of election-year intrigue.

On the surface, this story appeals to me like Jarmusch’s samurai-gangsta fantasy Ghost Dog, with the strange mash of an earnest, book-spiritual, and altogether cool protagonist dogged by comic mobsters in an alternate New York. If I could manage below the surface, it would certainly reveal kinship to a whole slew of brilliance—others have suggested Ellison and Mosley, Kafka and Borges.

Must confess this was not an easy book to get into—took me forever to read. The narrative is fragmented and chronologically challenged, which makes for difficult reentry when you’re prone to distractions or narcoleptic seizures and limited to reading no more than three to five pages at a time, as I have been recently. Ultimately, the author’s fabulous way with words rewarded the challenge. I am richer for having met minor characters like Lila Mae’s sole ally in the Department, a gentle contrarian obsessed with escalators:

Chuck, poor Chuck, he really wants it, working late on a Sunday night alone in the office…He needs to work on his monograph, so he comes to the Pit. “Understanding Patterns of Escalator Use in Department Stores Simultaneously Equipped With Elevators”—the heft of the thing, he can barely stand it sometimes, being of delicate sensibilities.

(Chuck’s dissertation [105-106] stands with the Institute for Vertical Transport seminar discussion of Theoretical Elevators [100-102] as giddy high points of the fantasy. Close on is the legend of the founding father of Intuitionism in his declining years dunking the provost’s head in the punch bowl at a hoity-toity Institute ceremony.)

Or one of the thugs (”the philosophically inclined one”) raiding her humble apartment:

John needs patterns, and labors after them even when circumstances betray him. Because there must be patterns, experience is recursive, and if the pattern has not announced itself yet, it will, eloquent and emphatic in a mild-mannered sort of way. He’s still searching for a concordance between the loss of his virginity (purchased) and an ankle sprain (accidental) exactly three years later, give or take an hour. John is sure it will come, awaiting another item in the series or a new perspective on the extant ones. (28)

Or one of the thugs’ other victims, by way of his star body part:

Ben Urich’s index finger is a key player, versatile, dependable for mundane tasks and in the clinch, where it truly distinguishes itself. Never hesitant to mine a dry nostril after barnacles, yet a sensitive enough instrument for navigating house keys into cantankerous locks. Ben uses his index finger to summon waiters hither to collect the check, and to tap surfaces (tabletops, seats, his right thigh) when he’s nervous or just killing time. Far worse than the roseate flare he feels when the silent man bends his finger an ill-advised ninety degrees past where it would normally wander during normal use is the sound of the resultant break. Twiggy. The sound is far, far worse than the pain. Initially. It says to him, this is how fragile your body is. Not to mention pressing the call buttons of elevators: his index finger is the most naturally of all the hand’s digits conscripted into call-button service. (74)

Indeed, his word-ninja prowess can elevate a dull old stairway to awesomeness:

Three quiet flights up, past racks that at one point fastened fire extinguishers but had been frustrated in their purpose by anonymous miscreants of uncertain intent.

Sublime!

Coming up on the reading list (because like dear John, I too need patterns):

• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. I was obsessed with Richard Wright in high school. Can’t recall reading Ellison though.
• John Henry Days, Whitehead’s other novel, eventually.
• Class Matters, by correspondents of the New York Times. Because class is the new race?

Ammazza, Signora Roma, che voce che ci avete!
—Market vendor to his vociferous neighbor

Ammazza che stupenda é la Magnani! She’s fascinating to watch, and Mamma Roma, Pasolini’s iconic film about a desperate, overbearing mother, is built for her. The rest of the cast is great too—her sulky teenage son Ettore, sleazy pimp Carmine, young neighborhood tramp Bruna, Ettore’s gang—but in that awkward, neorealist, “I can’t act but I’m trying” way. La Magnani is an operatic diva, stealing every scene she’s in. Tear your eyes away from all the beautiful faces a mo’ to behold the Roman landscape, ancient aqueduct competing with modern high-rise apartments, all seemingly in the middle of nowhere. But beware Pasolini’s heavy-handed, eye-roll inducing religious imagery that puts the ending over the top.

La ricotta is a tasty little bite of Pasolini, the thick religious imagery now tempered with irreverent and self-deprecating humor. It’s a thirty-minute film, originally released as a segment of RoGoPaG (1963), that earned him a date in court on charges of blasphemy. The Catholic ruling class of the day was not impressed, apparently, but I loved it! Orson Welles plays a radical Catholic Communist director (ehm) filming the Passion of Christ on the outskirts of Rome. A poor local man, who has landed work on the production as an extra, goes to great lengths to feed himself after sacrificing his catered lunch for his family, and ends up making the ultimate sacrifice. Marvel at the dandies doin’ the twist in between takes (a goofy six-tays kind of wonderful), and the slapstick fast-motion bum-scratching! And Ettore, the striking son of Mamma Roma, makes an appearance—I think he’s the one who drops Christ during the pietà. Hilarity ensues! Who knew?

****

• More Pasolini: Accattone
• More Magnani: her Tennessee Williams films, Nella città l’inferno (stint in jail opposite Giulietta Masina—!!), Rossellini’s L’amore, and Visconti’s Bellissima. And I would watch both Roma and Roma, città aperta again anytime!

**

Coming down the assembly line: Maybe I’ll get around to sinking my teeth into The Jungle. (That’s a book.) No more crappy film adaptations for a while.

***

Coming soon: any and all Tony Leung gigs not directed by Ang Lee

It’s a murder mystery unraveled via slice-of-life stories of the various Roman proles who passed through the park adjacent to the scene of the crime. Each segment begins with a police interrogation and a flashback to the beginning of the day, and is marked by a sudden afternoon downpour. In between these episodes are glimpses of the victim moving gently around her room during that storm, preparing for her night’s work. Bertolucci claims he hadn’t yet seen Rashomon (1950), but I’m not convinced. Maybe Pasolini was influenced by the famous Kurosawa film?

La commare secca is very easy on the eyes and by far my favorite of Bertolucci’s films.* Beautiful faces and some terrific moments of melodrama—just engrossing. Fascinating Italian dialects too! And I love the strange and striking six-tays dance scene at the climax. Feels like I’d seen it before. Ditto the scene with the kids dancing to a record player in the apartment.

Criterion + my public library = big love

****

From here:

• avanti ad Accattone e la magnifica Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma
• un ripasso di Il conformista
  

*Last Tango in Paris—traumatizing; the four hours of 1900—forgettable, apparently; The Last Emperor and Little Buddha—I don’t remember much about them either (totally overshadowed by Scorsese’s Kundun in my mind); Stealing Beauty—gag me with a spoon; The Dreamers—just not interested…

Overall it has a nihilistic aura. “Surely the whole point is that everything’s been done,” says the semiotics student to Prof. Edgardo Ugo, as they discuss a not-so-novel idea for a novel. It is this exchange that offered any sense of catharsis, rather than the denouement of the plot (the details of which are already forgotten):

‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book,’ Ugo said at last. ‘For years, I mean. Cornell, early 1980s. Wonderful campus, magnificent library. Some reference text in English. …It was entitled, in gold-blocked letters on the spine, “BACK to BOLOGNA,” those being the headings of the first and last articles in that particular volume. …[T]his experience made me realise two things. One was the obvious fact that I was homesick, my research project was stalled, and the only way that I could salvage something from it was by going back to Bologna.’

‘Which you did?’

‘I came home, yes. And as it turned out, wrote the book that really launched my career. What I didn’t write was the second thing suggested to me by that reference work in the library at Cornell, namely Back to Boulogne, a mystery in which the detective solves nothing. For my protagonist I had in mind a certain Inspecteur Nez, playing on the French word for nose, as in “has a nose for” but also “led by the nose”. In short, at once a deconstruction of the realistic, plot-driven novel and an hommage to Georges Simenon, the master of Robbe-Grillet and hence in a sense of us all. Any amount of atmosphere and sense of place, in other words, but no solution, just a strong final curtain line.’

Rodolfo stole a glance at his watch.

‘Why not scrap the sense of place too?’ he murmured.

Alas, I confess to having rushed headlong at this book with high expectations for exactly that atmosphere and sense of place. I was yearning for a hearty dose of armchair travel to the beloved city where I once lived and haven’t yet managed to get back to. So, while I generally appreciate clever wordplay and metafiction, I was disappointed to miss a straightforward escape, a satisfying noir teeming with precise and detailed descriptions of that place I love. And I felt grumpy and distracted when Dibdin actually names Umberto Eco in his text at one point, on top of the obvious parody throughout. Why did he do that? Maybe my metafiction skills are rusty, or just amateur. Reading up on Simenon and Robbe-Grillet certainly had me wondering how much of Dibdin’s book was over my head.

The cute wordplay in another scene certainly registered. Here the semiotics student is harassed about his choice of discipline by a second authority figure, his dad, a hardworking Southerner in construction:

‘What the hell is this semiotica all about, anyway? …If you have to waste more of your time and my money at university, why not go the whole hog and study ottica? That way you could at least make some money as an eye doctor when you finally graduate…’

‘You’re confusing the etymology, Dad.’

My dear dad (who’s quite good with words himself) was patient and supportive throughout my linguistics-literature double major, and never said anything like this to me. But I sure have second-guessed myself and played out such conversations internally!

After finishing the book I read speculation that Dibdin was tiring of his protagonist in this tenth and penultimate entry in the Aurelio Zen series. Some critics recommended heading elsewhere―to the beginning of the series (Ratking) or to Venice (Dead Lagoon) or Sicily (Blood Rain). I’ll consider visiting these other stories, once I recover from his bummer of a Bologna.