The Intuitionist takes place in a city (implicitly, New York) full of skyscrapers and other buildings requiring vertical transportation in the form of elevators.

To cope with the inspectorate, the corporate elevator establishment, and other looming elements, she must return to her intellectual roots, the texts (both known and lost) of the founder of the school, to try to reconstruct what is happening around her.

In the course of her search, she discovers the central idea of the founder of Intuitionism – that of the "black box", the perfect elevator, which will deliver the people to the city of the future.

A Newsweek review wrote, "255 pages of the most engaging literary sleuthing you'll read this year," and "What makes the novel so extraordinary is the ways in which Whitehead plays with notions of race.

"[1] Walter Kirn, writing in Time, called it "The freshest racial allegory since Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.