“The Intuitionist,” Colson Whitehead’s debut novel of elevator intrigue, combines hardboiled detective novels with social commentary to create a metaphor for racism.

Lila Mae Watson is an Intuitionist, an elevator inspector whose specialty is finding defective parts by sensing problems as she rides in an elevator. The Empiricist, elevator inspectors who detect malfunctions through manual investigation, consider Intuitionism nonsense. When an elevator in the Fanny Briggs building collapses, an elevator Lila Mae inspected, the President of the Elevator Inspector’s Guild, uses the incident to attack Intuitionism and his opponent Orville Lever, also an Intuitionist, in the upcoming election. Lila Mae must uncover the truth about who caused the elevator to freefall.

“The Intuitionist,” contains all the elements of a classic hardboiled detective novel. There’s a murder, albeit of an elevator car, political scandal/corruption, and the mafia. There’s even the sense of powerlessness that all hardboiled protagonists feel when they realize the political machine is bigger then they are, that one man can’t change the system. But “The Intuitionist,” isn’t really a detective story. It’s an exploration of how people move in cities. Vertically. With vertical movement, people could challenge the skies, building mammoth structures, freeing them from the ground, defying gravity.

Whitehead also uses elevators as a metaphor for the social elevation of African-Americans. Although not stated, “The Intuitionist,” takes place somewhere in the 1930’s-40’s. Lila Mae is the second black elevator inspector, and the first woman. The white characters in the book exhibit either full blown racism, or tentatively express interest in cautious integration. When Intuitionist founder, James Fulton’s journals are found, detailing a new perfect elevator that can ascend heavenward, Lila Mae views it as an opportunity for African-Americans to uplift themselves, Fulton being half-black.

“The Intuitionist,” is a beautifully written, multi-layered novel, using a single item to express several themes to tremendous effect.

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“Ragtime,” E.L. Doctorow’s tale of turn of the century America, captures the excitement and tumult of the era, interweaving lives of two fictional families with several historical figures.

“Ragtime” begins with Harry Houdini crashing his car into a tree in a nameless family’s front yard. The Boy watches his hero stumble from the car, then discuss Father’s accompanying Robert Peary to the North Pole. When Father returns he finds Mother’s Younger Brother has been chasing Evelyn Nesbit around New York, encountering anarchist Emma Goldman and the other fictional family, Jewish immigrants, who later go into film, both family’s met again at the book’s end. Mother finds an African-American baby buried in their backyard and boards Sarah, the child’s mother. Pianist Coalhouse Walker Jr. calls on Sarah, intent on proposing. Coalhouse is slighted by the local fire chief, his car destroyed, and demands restitution. When it isn’t received, he begins a murderous firebombing campaign, with the help of Mother’s Younger Brother, that leads to the library of J.P. Morgan.

By using historical characters, Doctorow grounds “Ragtime” in America’s adolescence, an era of rapid growth. Emma Goldman worked to improve labor practices, Houdini debunked psychic mediums, Evelyn Nesbit became one of the first celebutants with the high profile murder trial of her husband Henry K. Thaw, and J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford transformed business and manufacturing. Doctorow links all these characters with his two fictional families, showing that everyone was affected by the changes happening then.

Stylistically, Doctorow’s prose appears cold and text bookish, but that is an inaccurate assessment. He imbues his narrative with emotion, stating events simply, factually, but with detail, allowing the reader to form emotional bonds with all the characters based on their responses to tragedy. The result being, “Ragtime” is a satisfying and insightful read into the events and ethos of The Gilded Age.

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Christopher Buckley’s novel “Little Green Men” satirizes alien conspiracies, pondering the possibility that all alien abductions are not extraterrestrial, but the US government’s attempt to distract the population with cattle mutilations, crop circles, and anal probing.

Nathan Scrubbs, a Majestic-12 operative, upset with his career path, tires of sitting in a small room hearing reports from field operatives dressed in silver Mylar and latex masks, detailing how they abducted obese Midwesterners. Drunk on a Sunday morning, he sees conservative talk show host John O. Banion’s television program and decides Banion (think George Will) would make the perfect abductee, someone with enough clout to legitimize extraterrestrial belief. Scrubbs has Banion abducted and anal probed, twice. Banion, a prim Princetonian, unaware the abductions were government operations, becomes the spokesman and leader of the alien abduction movement, calling for Congress to hold hearings and release top secret information on alien activity, even holding a rally on the Washington Mall. Once he discovers the truth, Banion must find a way to stop his own assassination by MJ-12, impede a militia of militant abductees from storming Cape Canaveral, and regain his credibility.

Buckley’s satirical gift comes, not from creating a ludicrous world a la Douglas Adams, but by taking an ordinary character and placing him in extraordinary circumstances. Banion is rational, intelligent, and articulate and Buckley transforms him into the epicenter of an irrational alien conspiracy world. Banion initially has a hard time functioning in this new world, but quickly acclimates. Buckley then takes Banion out of his new element, returning him, newly formed, to Washington, where we witness mainstream society’s negative reaction to Banion’s metaphoses, all done brilliantly by Buckley.

Christopher Buckley expertly skewers politics. And in “Little Green Men,” Buckley satirizes another aspect of Washington. The scary part is, with all the conspiracy theories floating around, he might be right.

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When I first read “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” at fourteen, I admit, I didn’t like it. When I read it a year later, I loved its zaniness, the wacky names and improbability. Reading it again, some twenty years later, I gained a deeper appreciation for Douglas Adams’ masterpiece.

Adams’ tale of displaced Earthling Arthur Dent endures because it’s a multi-layered farce, satirizing strict bureaucracy and random occurrences in the Universe. Adams hurls Dent into a comical universe with nothing more than a guidebook, which isn’t really helpful to the Universe’s uninitiated, and a guide, Ford Prefect, who is only marginally helpful in that he stuck a fish in Arthur’s ear. Through Dent’s naïve, overwhelmed eyes, Adams shows the universe’s absurdities and thus the absurdities of our own world, the injustices of bureaucracy, the self-serving nature of ideologues.

The Vogons destroy Earth with the same justification, protected by an indifferent bureaucracy, as those bulldozing Arthur Dents home. Everyone can relate to the terror of having their home demolished, or foreclosed, and being powerless to stop it, but Adams intensifies powerlessness to the absurd by destroying Earth and having the only means of protest located on Alpha Centauri, four light-years away, making destruction inescapable. Earth suffers the same fate as Arthur Dent’s home.

When Arthur Dent travels to Magrathea, home world of planet builders, Dent witnesses the history of Earth’s creation, watching as the super computer Deep Thought takes seven and a half million years to ponder the Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Two philosophers develop contradictory views of what that answer might be, cashing in on the publicity, using media to attack each other. Here Adams satirizes bipartisan belief systems by using two disagreeing cosmic philosophers to symbolize all groups profiting from public arguments (read politics, religion, anything where two apposing sides benefit financially from bickering).

“Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is a wacky romp though an absurd Universe. But it is also a Swiftian tale where, like Gulliver, we witnesses, through Arthur Dent, some of what Adams considers to be humanity’s failings amplified to cosmic proportions.

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We all age. It’s unavoidable. But for baby boomers, flower children, hippies, demographics currently dealing with aging’s effects, deteriorating physical and mental health, loss of friends, family and youth, and possible institutionalization, the end of life is often bittersweet. Tim Sandlin’s novel, “Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty,” follows hippies in assisted living as they confront the complications of aging.

Guy Fontaine, an Oklahoman who may or may not suffer from dementia, is checked into Mission Pescadero, a Northern California continuing care facility occupied by aging hippies re-experiencing their youth. The residents divide themselves into groups based on where they were in 1967, discussing which bands played the Fillmore and who played guitar. They smoke weed and take Viagra, recreating the “Summer of Love,” essentially regressing to their teenage years. Guy, a witness and victim of the facility administrator’s dehumanizing tactics, initiates a senior rebellion, mirroring “One Flew Over the Cockoo’s Nest.” The residents take over the facility using the same methods they used on college campuses in the 60’s.

Sandlin’s novel explores many themes regarding aging, one of which is mental regression. The aged hippies have regressed to a time when they were vital. They relive old loves and heartache, sleeping with people they loved when young. Their political concerns revert to Viet Nam and Nixon. And once the revolution begins, many residents can’t differentiate between past and present.

Another theme of Sandlin’s book is the treatment of seniors. Early in the book, the Mission Pescadero residents futilely try regaining their dignity in a system that has taken their finances and freedom. Many of the residents’ wealth has been legally usurped and squandered by conservators and family. By pitting his seniors against a system designed to silence them, Sandlin makes his readers think about the treatment of their family’s elders.

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Many authors have used history as a spring board for fiction. Others have used it for speculation, rearranging historical events, imagining possible outcomes, asking “What would happen if…”

Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon uses the 1940 Slattery Report, a proposal to relocate Eastern European Jews to Alaska, as the basis for his hard-boiled detective novel, “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.”

In his novel, Sitka, Alaska is home to 2.5 million Yiddish speaking Jews, including alcoholic, claustrophobic homicide detective Meyer Landsman. Living in a flop house, he’s woken by the night manager to investigate the murder of one of the residents. Landsman empathizes with the murder victim, a chess playing junkie, and investigates zealously, irritating his ex-wife/lieutenant. Landsman’s case leads him through Sitka’s chess world, Jewish mafia, Zionist mercenaries, and a CIA conspiracy to take back the Holy Land.

Chabon has expertly constructed a believable reality. He has taken world events and unraveled them, exploring possible outcomes. Chabon uses the backdrop of Sitka to explain his new world by going into great detail about his imagined, Sitka, Alaska. He details street names, building names, discusses their histories, successes and failures, to explain events since 1940. The overall affect is a believable fictional world.

Chabon’s novel, at its core, is a detective novel and his protagonist must solve a murder. Here again, Chabon succeeds. With every clue, every investigational progress, Chabon raises the stakes. First the victim’s a junkie, then he’s the Jewish Mafia Kingpin’s prodigal son, then he’s possibly Messiah, then he’s the lynchpin in the plot to invade Palestine. By raising the stakes, Chabon decreases his protagonist’s chances for success, creating greater tension for the reader.

“The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” gently flows, due to Chabon’s soothing literary voice. But his voice doesn’t interfere with the grittiness inherent in hard-boiled detective novels. Chabon’s characters’ rawness balances his poetic prose, creating a multi-textured, compelling novel.

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Charles Baxter explores his character’s ability to recognize true love as their lives intertwine in his novel, “The Feast of Love.”

“The Feast of Love” centers around Bradley Smith, an artist and coffee shop owner with two failed marriages, who is a hopeless romantic. He tells his story to Charlie Baxter, the character, inspiring him to interview Bradley’s ex-wives, neighbors, and employees. These characters then become the primary narrators of the book.

“The Feast of Love,” is another multiple POV (point of view) novel executed exceptionally. Each character establishes and maintains their unique voice throughout the book. Bradley Smith is an introspective romantic, who understands more than the other characters give him credit. His ex-wife Diana, a lawyer, is tough and cold, not looking for love, but finding it anyway in her lover David. Chloe, hopelessly in love with her boyfriend Oscar, is an uneducated, innocent early-20’s child, who speaks with excitement about her world. And Harry Ginsberg, the philosophy professor, pontificates about Kierkegaard.

Aside from personal connections, the characters are linked through metaphors. Early in the book Bradley Smith tells Charlie his book should be called “The Feast of Love,” because that’s what Bradley’s life has been. Later we learn this is also the title of one of Bradley’s paintings, his masterpiece. Baxter uses the title as a metaphor for all his character’s experiences, each one of them referencing the painting or the concept in their narrative. By doing so, he thematically connects his characters, focusing their attention on their definition of love.

“The Feast of Love,” is beautifully written. Baxter is remarkably deliberate with word choice, crafting delightful sentences and images. His characters speak, essentially, on the same topic, love, in their own unique voice, with phrasing and rhythm and vocabulary. “The Feast of Love” is a rare book, a masterfully told story, by a brilliant writer.

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New York Times bestseller, Christopher Moore, has authored twelve books, including “Lamb,” “Fool,” and “Bite Me.” His combination of fantasy and irreverent humor has earned him a cult following among his readers. Moore was kind enough to answer some questions for Ink and Page.

Chistopher Moore

Ben Adams: In my blog write-up of your vampire trilogy, I discuss your evolution as a writer over the twelve years between the publication of the first and second book. What is one thing you learned during that period that helped you grow as a writer?

Christopher Moore: Mainly, what I learned in that period was patience. I learned that I didn’t have to throw everything I had at the page every minute. It’s hard to identify single elements, not because there wasn’t much change, but because there was so much. You’re always learning as a writer, and I tend try different kinds of projects, things I haven’t done before. For example, when I wrote the first vampire book, I had never even written a piece in first person, which became instrumental in the second vampire book.

BA: Abby Normal is such a unique and striking character. Would you talk about how you developed her voice and how you decided on where to use her as a narrator?

CM: For a long time I’d been fascinated with the whole phenomenon of the “perky Goth”, and I would see Goth kids in the City when I was out and about researching my book A Dirty Job. The same way that bunker survivalists seem to really be looking forward to a good Apocalypse so they can get their survival on, these Goth kids seemed to be really yearning for something dark and mysterious to happen to them, so I thought it would be great to make that happen. I tend to learn diction by ear, which is to say, I try to immerse myself in the way a character talks to a point where I just pick up the rhythms of their speech. With a Goth kid, that would have just been creepy, so I spent a lot of time reading Goth blog sites and lurking on Goth chat sites, picking up the way the people of the dark talked. This was in 2006, when MySpace was at its height, and blogging was all the rage. I built Abby’s way of talking from the way people wrote on those blogs, taking the most clever and funniest people and sort of Frankensteining them into a character. There was also a little bit of eavesdropping at coffee shops and so forth. Interestingly enough, when I went back to look for fresh material when I wrote the third vampire book in 2009, the blogs were gone, replaced by texting and twitter. I had been really fortunate to be able to mine that source for the short period it existed.

BA: I was wondering if you would discuss your approach to pacing regarding humor in narrative and finding a balance between the two.

CM: I think I do it more by instinct now, but because I know people come to my books for the humor, I start to get nervous when I have too much narrative without anything funny. I will stop and try to think of a way to direct the narrative toward a humorous exchange or situation. The counterpoint of drama, or emotion, and humor is important. If everything is completely light and fluffy, the humor doesn’t work as well. I find the best balance is to take my character’s interests and agendas very seriously, let them experience pain and anxiety, then throw something funny in as a relief to the reader. I think the counterpoint between the two makes for a more engaging experience for the reader, disarms them, if you will. With some characters, however, they are just funny by nature, even when they are suffering. Pocket, my main character in Fool, seems nearly incapable of not being funny, simply because of the way he talks, so the challenge there was to get through the scenes in the book where something dire and serious happens without having him joke about it.

BA: How has your experience in the visual arts (photography, sumi-e ink painting) affected your writing?

CM: It’s hard to say. I’ve been taking pictures as long as I’ve been writing, so whatever “eye” might have developed from working in the visual arts has always been there. For the first ten years or so of my career, I didn’t even take pictures when I researched a book because I wanted what was vivid in my mind to be the image that I conveyed to the reader. If you can’t put it in words, it’s more or less useless to you as a writer, so while it might seem that the visual arts would help with writing, the ability to see and express images in language is more valuable. That said, a lot of the material I’ve written about has come out of the visual arts. I have some command of the vocabulary of the arts, and that always helps. You learn specific vocabularies for every subject you study, and mixing and matching words out of their context can help to make your prose more interesting.

BA: Would you talk about your relationship with your readers and your use of social media? Because, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it, an author making himself so accessible.

CM: A long time ago, before I had started to sell books, I worked in a restaurant with a fellow who was a fine-art painter. He was and is very good, and yet he had to augment his art income by bar tending. One night someone came into the bar and was sort of taunting him that a less-talented and educated artist that we both knew had sold a drawing that day, when my friend had gone some time without selling a piece. Rather than take the bait, my friend said, “Well, she communicated with someone, didn’t she? Art is about communication, and what she had to say resonated with a buyer.” He wasn’t offended or competitive about it, but simply resolved to the truth that art was communication.

When I started to publish books, my publisher didn’t tour me. I wasn’t able to actually have a dialog with my readers. Communication, it seemed to me, wasn’t actually communication if it was one way. So when e-mail became a viable medium, about 1995, I started putting my e-mail address on my books, and made an effort to answer every single message that I received. I still do. People tease me sometimes about still having an AOL address that’s active. They don’t realize that in 1995 there were only about three domain names for e-mail servers. AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy WERE the internet. I have to keep that address active because I have a million books floating around out there that still have that address on it.

Anyway, as social media rose, I just transitioned into using it, mostly at the encouragement of readers who I’d met through e-mail. It’s much more challenging than just answering e-mails, and more demanding of my time, but less challenging than writing entertaining blogs, which was the trend for a few years, and really difficult to keep up with. I’ve never been comfortable with posting things like, “having a great cinnamon latte” or “great dinner with my editor!” My life just isn’t that interesting, even to me, so I try not to post anything unless I feel it’s informative or funny, even in Twitter. Along with everyone else, I’m trying to figure out the most efficient and pleasant way to use these media and trying to find some sort of balance between communicating and being annoying (and annoyed). I suspect that by the time I get a handle on it, it will have change. I still try to be attentive to what my readers say, but you simply can’t answer the constant stream of comments that come in on Facebook and Twitter, and unfortunately, because they don’t support threading of comments, both are terrible forums for actually having discussions and dialogue. It’s as if they are constructed to promote ADD, rather than an exchange of ideas. Run in, shout whatever is in your head, then run out until you think of something else, totally unrelated. I don’t really have any advice for anyone about social networking because I’m still learning it. I try not to be a complete self-promotion whore, but I know people want to know what new books I have coming out, and where I’m appearing, so you have to call attention to those things. I try to stick to one, single rule, “If you don’t have anything to say, shut the fuck up.” I think that’s in the Bible or something.

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Between 1995 and 2010, Christopher Moore published a vampire trilogy that introduced several of his most memorable characters and solidified his status as one of literature’s preeminent humorists.

Bloodsucking Fiends

Jody, a recently turned vampire, wakes in an overturned dumpster to find her hand burned and senses heightened. She quickly realizes what’s happened to her, after attacking and drinking her boyfriend’s blood. Seeking someone to help her during the day, Jody encounters C. Thomas Flood (Tommy to his friends, the C. being an affectation), a would-be writer new to San Francisco who works nights at Safeway. She convinces him to become her minion while she learns the nature of her vampirism. The two quickly fall in love.

Meanwhile, the vampire that turned Jody begins leaving bodies throughout the City, testing her to ascertain if she’s worthy of immortality. He eventually decides to kill Tommy. Tommy and his co-workers, The Animals, track the vampire to his lair, a yacht, where they steal his art collection before destroying the ship.

You Suck: A Love Story

Jody has turned Tommy into a vampire, much to his chagrin. Tommy, who enjoyed his humanity, struggles with his change. He finds a new minion, 16 year-old Goth blogger Abby Von Normal. His old co-workers, The Animals, return from a trip to Las Vegas with a blue hooker, aptly named Blue, looking for Tommy. Blue, accidentally told by The Animals that Jody and Tommy are vampires, desires to be turned. The Animals kidnap Tommy and he mistakenly turns Blue into a vampire when he attempted to kill her. Blue turns The Animals, who hate being vampires because they can’t drink or smoke weed, and leads them after Tommy and Jody, trying to get money they took from her. Meanwhile, the Emperor of San Francisco, a crazy homeless man and reoccurring character in Moore’s books, witnesses three more vampires entering the City. The three are intent on preserving their vampiric secret by destroying all vampires in San Francisco.

Abby Von Normal and her boyfriend Foo Dog (Steve, a student who discovered a cure for vampirism) are living in Jody and Tommy’s loft, Jody and Tommy having been recently bronzed while they slept. Outside their loft, vampire cats attack the Emperor, as they prey on the City’s homeless population. Jody escapes her bronze shell and frees Tommy. Bronzed, Jody kept her sanity by turning into mist, but Tommy having never learned went insane in his copper and tin prison. Jody escapes and frees Tommy, who goes feral and joins the vampire cat herd, led by Chet, an enormous cat introduced in “You Suck.”

Abby Normal turns herself into a vampire using the blood of vampire rats, created by Foo Dog for cure experiments. As a side affect of using rat blood, Abby grows a tail. Tommy regains his sanity as the old vampires return to San Francisco to wipe out all vampires, human and animal, and any witnesses, preserving the covert existence of vampires.

Usually trilogies or series are published sequentially, but Christopher Moore’s trilogy was published over a span of fifteen years, broken up by various other novels. Twelve years separate “Bloodsucking Fiends” and “You Suck,” and the differences are striking.

The last two books move at an extremely quick pace. The dialog snaps due to quick witted interplay between his characters. This was present in the first book, but only between certain characters. In the last two books, it is pervasive.

Moore also uses similes more affectively in the last two books. His similes are, for lack of a better way to say it, insane. He connects seemingly completely random images to describe a scene in an utterly hilarious way. “The cart’s rotating lights chased themselves like drunken, jaundiced Tinkerbells.” (27) “Foul magic fumes bubbled out of the kettle, like the flatulence of dragons on a demon-only diet.” (124) But these images aren’t completely random. They are all fantasy based, and relatable to Moore’s readers, readers familiar with his fictional universe. His similes are also irreverent and absolutely hilarious. And Moore has the wisdom to use them sparingly, so they become humorous and unexpected treats.

Another advance in Moore’s writing can be seen in his approach to the character Abby Normal, the teen Goth, vampire minion. Her blog entries comprise a major chunk of the narrative and her voice differs dramatically from Moore’s regular narrative voice. Her voice moves at breakneck speed and is full of slang that’s a hybrid of Goth angst, hip-hop vernacular, text message acronyms, and general teen slang. Moore combines all these with his exceptional ear for language and comic timing to give Abby’s narratives a spunky adolescence that counterbalances his narrative voice.

One aspect of Moore’s writing that sets him apart is his willingness to let his characters live in the same universe. “Bloodsucking Fiends,” introduces characters that are featured in subsequent novels, and features one character, Inspector Rivera, from his previous novels. “You Suck” contains scenes from another novel, “A Dirty Job,” and visa versa. “Bite Me” continues the trend with a cameo from Kona, the white Rasta from “Fluke, or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings.” Readers of “Fluke” are quick to recall the words written on the whale’s tail. By including Kona in “Bite Me,” Moore has, in essence, written a private joke exclusively for his fans.

When comparing the three books it’s easy to see how Moore’s writing has grown. This isn’t to say that “Bloodsucking Fiends” is not a good book. It’s very good and contains a tremendous amount of heart. Nor is it to say that the last two books are superior. Upon reading the three books sequentially, it becomes obvious that Moore’s writing has evolved, grown with time, which is all any artist can hope for.

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Jesus Christ’s life and teachings have been debated and discussed for the past 2000 years, but only the last three years of his life. What happened during the first 30? This is the premise of Christopher Moore’s fictional book, “Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal.”

In “Lamb”, Moore depicts Joshua (Jesus in Greek), and Biff’s travels from Nazareth to India learning Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, religions that influence Joshua’s future teachings. After 19 years traveling, the duo return and, well, we know the rest.

There are several aspects of “Lamb” I find remarkable; mainly, the lack of editorializing. In a lesser author’s hands, “Lamb” could have easily descended into condemnation of people of faith or non-believers. Instead, Moore allows his characters to retain their historical significance, giving them humanity and, most importantly, a sense of humor. How often do we associate Jesus with practical jokes? i.e. walking on water.

Moore accepts religion’s place in modern society, showing its universality. He sends his characters east, searching for the Three Wiseman, whose teachings influence Joshua. Joshua studies Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, taking the best aspects of each and assimilating them into his philosophy. Moore quotes the Bhagavad Gita, then shows that Joshua’s interpretation of ancient text mirror Biblical scripture. Moore does this with the three religions, showing the similarities of all religions.

As a humorist, Moore excels at structure, set-up and punch line, in narrative and dialogue. His dialogue is sarcastic and his two or three running jokes appear continuously, adding cohesion, the way some writers use metaphor or imagery.

“Lamb” contains numerous Biblical references, real and fictional, that, having grown up in a religious household, I found hilarious. The book, overall, is effectively touching. I know it’s a cliché to say something should be required reading, but “Lamb” should be required reading for Comparative Religion majors.

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