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In world somewhat like a cinematic, hard-boiled '50s era (reporters use typewriters; pay phones cost a dime; men wear hats and paw at cigarette girls), elevators are considered essential to progress, and elevator inspectors have an authority comparable to police or fire inspectors. Rita Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector, suddenly finds herself in trouble when an elevator that she gave the okay to goes into freefall. It doesn’t help that she’s an Intuitionist, someone who can sense the elevator’s working as shapes and colors, rather than a solid, sensible Empiricist who looks at the workings of the machine. As the rival factions fight for power within the Guild, suspicion hangs over Rita. Threatened by thugs and mobbed-up municipal warlords, she starts looking for answers, and finds scandal on all sides.

This is a dense and fully original debut novel that gives away nothing easily. Whitehead starts the readers off fully immersed in his parallel universe of elevator inspectors and lets them figure it out as they go. It’s extremely Pynchonesque, the flights of fancy about mundane objects, the discursions and back histories of minor characters, the multiple plot lines and shifting chronology. In addition to a being a sci-fi noir alternate history, the book is also a meditation on the struggles of race and gender in social progress. Elevators lift us through space but metaphorically lift us through class strata and away from low dirt to the future and civilization. And in the novel, the "perfect elevator," the hypothetical machine that sees through the "skin of things" into their real essence, is a danger to the established order. It’s truly a dizzying, innovative, visionary first novel, and Whitehead’s intelligent, surgical prose serves it well. Near the end, I got the sense that the themes of this novel are too big even for Whitehead to contain within the boundaries of its setting. Maybe that’s why the book ends the way it does � with a hypothetical future still not fully realized.