In its emphasis on verisimilitude and its depiction of social relations, Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist is a realist novel and thus deviates substantially from the more experimental set-ups of Castillo's and Ondaatje's narratives discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. While The Mixquiahuala Letters’ and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid's respective forms emphasise and enact incompleteness, processuality, and divergence (a series of disconnected narrative and poetic vignettes in Ondaatje's case; a set of letters that present the reader with three divergent story variants in Castillo's), nothing like that holds for Whitehead's novel. The Intuitionist can be described as a realist African American alternate history detective novel, clearly structured into two parts, which are subdivided into another two parts respectively. Several commentators have labelled it a postmodern novel (Bérubé 2004: 163; Liggins 2006: 365; Russell 2007: 46), but this characterisation at best holds in terms of literary history, not form. While it might thus be a postmodern novel, it is certainly not a postmodernist novel. Michele Elam even describes it as employing a ‘naturalistic’ tone (Elam 2011: 120). Ramón Saldívar proposes his own term, speculative realism, to account for the ‘revisions of realism and fantasy into speculative forms’ he sees at play in novels such as Whitehead's (Saldívar 2013: 3). I suggest that the term altermodern, as theorised by Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig, who provide a literary historical contextualisation and a formal qualification, best captures the novel's form. Thus, while it may be too early to herald it as a (literary) historical term, the altermodern comes to designate a specific poetics. Following Nicolas Bourriaud's original emphasis on time and temporality, Avanessian and Hennig meticulously tease out the time-related ramifications of altermodernist narrative fiction. In doing so, they stress the importance of grammatical tense. In their account, a specific use of the present tense becomes the most significant marker of the altermodern and its negotiation of temporality, narrativity, fictionality, and reality – all issues that are at the heart of The Intuitionist, which indeed is a present-tense novel. Since this altermodernist poetics is perfectly compatible with a realist style, The Intuitionist's realism can be further qualified as altermodern realism.

The novel tells the story of Lila Mae Watson, the first female African American elevator inspector and an Intuitionist.