Lightning Rods

by Helen DeWitt

An uproarious, hard-boiled modern fable of corporate life, sex, and race in America, Helen Dewitt's Lightning Rods brims with satiric energy. Follow Joe the salesman in his meteoric rise through corporate America as he curtails sexual harassment in the office and increases productivity with his mysterious, mind-blowing invention. Lightning Rods is a mesmerizing blend of jaw-dropping social commentary and no-holds-barred humor, all with radical approach that takes modern storytelling into new realms of possibility.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Literary Fiction, Satire, Novels, Contemporary, Comedy

273 pages, Paperback

First published October 5, 2011

About the author

Helen DeWitt (born 1957 in Takoma Park, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.) is a novelist.

DeWitt grew up primarily in South America (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador), as her parents worked in the United States diplomatic service. After a year at Northfield Mount Hermon School and two short periods at Smith College, DeWitt studied classics at the University of Oxford, first at Lady Margaret Hall, and then at Brasenose College for her D.Phil.

DeWitt is best known for her acclaimed debut novel, The Last Samurai. She held a variety of jobs while struggling to finish a book, including a dictionary text tagger, a copytaker, and Dunkin' Donuts employee, she also worked in a laundry service. During this time she reportedly attempted to finish many novels, before finally completing The Last Samurai, her 50th manuscript, in 1998.

In 2005 she collaborated with Ingrid Kerma, the London-based painter, writing limit5 for the exhibition Blushing Brides.

In 2004, DeWitt went missing from her home in Staten Island. She was found unharmed a few days later at Niagara Falls.

DeWitt lives in Berlin where she has recently finished a second novel, Your Name Here, in collaboration with the Australian journalist Ilya Gridneff. DeWitt had met Gridneff in an East London pub shortly before her departure for New York; impressed by the linguistic virtuosity of his e-mails, she suggested a book inspired by Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, or Being John Malkovich, with Gridneff as Malkovich.

Reviews

[Fionnuala]

I bought this because it was promoted by a small independent publisher called '& other stories' and it sounded both hilarious and intriguing.
However, at the end of the day, when push comes to shove, De Witt spins a funny enough yarn but she’s skating on fairly thin ice.
It has to be said in her defence that she rolls out this ‘penetrating’ tale with her tongue placed firmly in her cheek and once you take that on board, things fall into place quick as lightning.
The main character, a failed encyclopaedia salesman, remarkable only for the mind-blowingly clichéd nature of his thoughts, dreams up an ingenious but slightly off the wall solution to the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace: Lightning Rods.
Now, if you’re wondering how lightning rods can possibly influence sexual harassment in the workplace, just think how the classic lightning rod attracts red hot energy and deflects it....

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

NOV 2017 UPDATE: THIS NOVEL WAS MAYBE A LITTLE AHEAD OF ITS TIME IN 2011 BUT NOW SEEMS ALMOST PLAUSIBLE

Written circa 1999, Helen DeWitt's second novel seems spawned by the stain on Monica Lewinsky's dress. Should've been published years before October 2011 -- a shame that those who LOVED DeWitt's first novel published in 2000, The Last Samurai, had to wait so long for NYC publishers to get their act together (long live New Directions!).

Readers who like to laugh should read this one: the first hundred pages seemed to have 1+ LOLs per page. Sometimes reminded me of George Saunders, Michel Houllebecq, Amanda Filipacchi, Charlie Kaufman, Torsten Krol. Initial hiliarity ensues thanks to the revelation and ridiculously enjoyable, rational unraveling of the title's significance. In a recent interview, she says this one was inspired by Mel Brooks and the "Springtime for Hiter" bit in "The Producers" rather than the considerably higher art "The Seven Samurai" by Kurosawa that inspired her first one.

With this one, revealing any of its audicious/bawdy turns would reduce its pleasures. Let's just say it's about an innovative solution to a workplace challenge and that this innovation is controversial at first but becomes more commonplace in time. A pleasure I will reveal is that every page is purposefully studded with cliched language, sometimes as many as three cliches/word packages per sentence. At times I was so badly busting a gut I felt like I could eat a horse, which is a whole different kettle of fish that once brought to water is a pea in the satirization pod re: the rise and sustained erection of an American business endeavor. Gotta love good ol' American get up and go.

The book's last line is "In America anything is possible" but the story ain't anything goes. Once it introduces and establishes the plot's implausible engine, the rest involves its rational defense against all obstacles, particularly politically correct ones but also those faced by any new business, like competition from cheaper services etc. Despite the initial freakishness, such focus is a strength but maybe also one of the book's weaknesses? A zany, rational, totally enjoyable pageturner, like DeWitt's first novel a little bit -- not as explicitly smart as "The Last Samurai" but still fundamentally smarter and culturally critical and joyously unhinged (and flat-out funnier, the first third of it at least) than most contemporary American fiction I've read.

As in her first book, lots of short chapters, cliffhangers, and white space between chapters so you finish a chapter and turn a few pages and suddenly find you're five pages deeper into the reading day's page count. There's something attractive about that apparently accelerative effect . . .

Anyway, friendly folks at New Directions (or elsewhere), please publish more of her manuscripts posthaste! She's got fans willing to buy her stuff and spread the word.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The following review is actually just a hastily patched-together conversation I had with my wife while I was finishing this book. It took place on the first nice day of an early Minnesotan spring, as we strolled around a lake with nice Midwestern families, dodging puddles from snow melt.


Me: You know that book I've been reading all the time lately?
Wife: Yeah.
Me: Have I told you how crazy it is?
Wife: Not really. What's crazy about it?
Me: Well it's this really odd satire of sexual harassment in the workplace where this guy invents a system whereby Lightening Rods have sex with high-performing employers in order to keep them from sexually harassing other women?
Wife: So they hire prostitutes?
Me: Well sort of. But not really. The Lightening Rods actually work in the companies doing other things, like secretarial work. The system is totally anonymous.
Wife: How?
Me. Well. Basically, they stick their asses through a wall in the handicapped bathroom.
Wife: Why are you laughing? That sounds horrible.
Me: I guess. But the book has this nonchalant tone that makes all of this funny somehow. It's obviously a terrible thing, but the combination of the satire and convincing quality of the argument makes you feel complicit somehow. It's weird. Sometimes I really think it's funny. And, other times, when I stop to think what's actually happening, I feel like a monster for laughing. Then I think about this guy I knew who worked for the Japanese stock exchange who had to take his clients to strip clubs whenever they came into town. It was almost similar to this. When the big guns visit the office, you reward them with sex in some form. I'm sure escorts were involved sometimes. We're closer to this kind of thing than you think.
Wife: Want to walk out on that dock?
Me: Sure.
Wife: I don't understand how women could have sex with someone through a wall and then just got back to work.
Me: Yeah. It's weird. I guess I don't either. Some of them are kind of traumatized.
Wife: I don't think I would like this book.
Me: You might not.
Wife: And why do these high-earners need this sexual release? I don't get the correlation?
Me: According to the book, they're the ones most likely to harass women and get the company sued. They're impulsive and overly confident. It's satiric.
Wife:...
Me: The first 100 pages were really good. But I'm getting a little bored of the thought experiment. Still, I'm kind of amazed that the author made this wild plot device fly. I wonder what I would think if a man had written this?
Wife: Should that make a difference?
Me: I don't know. Should it?
Wife: There aren't very many fathers out here with their kids today.
Me: Yeah, just a couple.
Wife: So are you going to finish the book?
Me: Uh huh.
Wife: I can't tell if you actually like it.
Me: Me neither. Honestly I thought it would be sexier. All the reviews I read made it sound like a book about sex. But it's really not. It's a book about corporate culture and sexual harassment more than sex. It's probably one of the un-sexiest books I've read. In fact, it's kind of hard to imagine what the sex would actually be like.
Wife:...
Me: Look at those ducks swimming in that freezing water. They look so calm.
Wife: Yeah.

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this novel was a wild experience. On the one hand, the book takes an exceedingly bleak view of human nature. The male characters are mostly frightfully misogynist, and the ones that aren't still seem able to rationalize anything, even behavior and points of view most of us would consider abhorrent. The female characters are bafflingly retro: not one of them sees sex as anything but a chore, and very few of them ("one in a thousand") seem to possess real intelligence and aspirations beyond secretarial work. For a while I tried to figure out who the author sympathized with here, but eventually I realized the answer had to be no one. Or maybe everyone?

Yet, this book is an absolute marvel of tone and storytelling. It makes things that should seem impossible seem almost plausible. It makes you consider ideas and points of view that should seem irredeemably outrageous--which isn't to say it'll change your mind, but just getting the reader to consider some of these ideas is a feat in and of itself. And it's funny. So funny. It's a satire about sexual mores and corporate culture, and the fact that it can be so provocative while still being so entertaining is quite an achievement. I feel slightly creeped out that I read and liked this novel, and I think my next read is going to have to be soul-cleansing in some way, but so far this has to be my favorite book of the year.

[nastya · Rating 2 out of 5]

This satirical premise had no business to be 300 pp long. It was sometimes biting, mostly angry, never funny, but most times it was just plain dull. In my personal opinion it should've been the length of her amorality play "The English Understand Wool" with its 60pp. But also I didn't find this as funny and clever as that one.

[Warwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book to throw in the direction of the next person who tries to tell you that there are only ‘seven basic plots’. Good luck finding anything else like this one.

It hinges on a salesman's dream – half erotic fantasy, half get-rich-quick scheme – to eliminate sexual harassment in the workplace. How? It's simple. Arrange for a discrete, anonymous release of men's urges by providing a service on-site: the bottom half of a woman protruding through a hole in the wall.

Like any good satire, this takes the most extreme and absurd premise it can come up with, and proceeds to think it through as seriously as possible. If this had been written by someone else (one is tempted to say, ‘if this had been written by a man’, but it's probably not that simple), there might have been a prurient element to it all – and the book would have been none the worse for that, but DeWitt is not interested in that stuff at all. What concerns her, and her salesman protagonist Joe, are the ancillary details: how would the woman's anonymity be assured? What would she be doing in the office for the rest of the time? How would HR departments react? How would such people be recruited? What about those in relationships? What about equal opportunities employment? Which legal loopholes would need to be navigated? What arrangements made for hygiene, safety, protection? And so on.

Obviously, DeWitt has many things in her sights here, including sexual politics, corporate culture, and the creeping commodification of individuals in America, a country which ‘was set up from scratch by people who managed to overlook minor details like slavery and a whole sex’. But the main parody at play is her incredible prose style, which is a sustained and hilarious mash-up of boardroom jargon, earnest sales pitch, and self-help cliché that exerts a cumulative effect on you as you read.

Plenty of men his age swore at computers. Roy swore by them. You could get an overall picture of what was going on in a place of work in five minutes that you couldn't have gotten in a year fifteen years ago. The thing to remember is, a computer is a tool. It's there to help you do what you want to do. Used properly, a computer can be a valuable aid in determining what exactly it is that you want to do. But at the end of the day it's just something to take care of things that would bore a human because they would take too long. It's a machine, if you will. Neither more nor less.

At times I felt like I was reading an American Alan Partridge, with the same sense of vaguely regressive platitudes dressed up as common-sense no-nonsense chat. In DeWitt's brief Acknowledgments section, she includes the fact that ‘Mel Brooks wrote “Springtime for Hitler”’, and certainly one way to look at the book is as an extended version of that song, with institutional misogyny substituting for antisemitism.

And of course, it's very much to the point that you should wonder about the ways this doesn't or shouldn't work. What about women, and their so-called urges? But that's exactly what the book is about: as Joe likes to remind us, ‘you have to take people the way they are, not the way you'd like them to be’. In his world – in, we might say, the Boomerish worldview of more than a few writers and commentators – sex is something that seems to be a biological urge for men and a domestic chore for women, and this book sets out to investigate the natural end-point of those assumptions with complete commitment. I thought it was absolutely brilliant.

[Anni · Rating 4 out of 5]

A failed vacuum salesman comes up with an unusual solution to the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace, based on his own masturbatory fantasies. Gasp in disbelief at DeWitt's deliberately offensive shock tactics, which deliver
a devastating feminist critique on office gender politics and the commodification of women in the media and pornographic industry. Shocking indeed, but is very effective.

Reviewed for whichbook.net

[Joey Comeau · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant and incredibly sharp satire - all wrapped up in the main character's childishly simplistic sexual fantasies. Again and again, while reading this book, you will shake your head in disbelief. But you'll do so with a smile on your face. The hero is a failed vacuum cleaner salesman who essentially brings his own erotic fan fiction to life. His plan: that women in the workplace can take on extra work as "Lightning rods" - anonymous sex partners for the men in the office to discharge their frustrations and lightning on. In? On? What was I talking about? Oh yeah, having sex with only the bottom half of women. This book is the best kind of feminist humour - the kind that you put down after reading and realize that it slipped a knife into you while you were laughing. And, if you are like me, then you will also be super turned on by what is essentially a parody of male sexual simplicity. You will be reading, and sort of squirming in your seat with arousal, and then you will think "Oh no! I have become what I most detest!" and then you will read a bit more about having sex with the anonymous bottom halves of women, and then you will begin the important task of trying to convince yourself that it is okay to go finish yourself off while thinking about this because you understand the satire and anyway you don't actually have sex with only the bottom halves of women at work right? You're a good person! And so handsome!

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

do you want to eliminate pesky sexual harassment lawsuits in the workplace?

why, install "lightning rods" service in your office to sate the inevitable urges of your top sales performers by giving them the opportunity for anonymous release! plus! you'll get extra use out of the disabled bathrooms! not to mention adequate office skills from a fine pool of temporary employees!

the protagonist of lightning rods is joe, a salesman who hits upon this business venture after failing to succeed in the door-to-door encyclopedia and vacuum games. he is certain the scheme will be a sure-fire money maker, deciding he can adapt his own sexual fantasies ("wall sex") to an enterprise he is sure will make him a success and solve the heartbreak of sexual harassment.

the novel is an old-fashioned satirical romp: i smirked and nicknamed it "the immodest proposal" as i read it. rather than baby food and famine, dewitt audaciously sets her sights on marketing, sales and sexual commerce in corporate culture. while the subject matter is salacious in that there is frank discussion of sex acts and masturbation it's not really smutty, like those books of nicholson baker's that can be VERY smutty. it actually reminded me more of The Mezzanine's dispassionate and detailed voice. the enduring love of language shared by both authors consistently betrayed in their writing is also much in evidence.

barring that interest in language, lightning rods has less in common with dewitt's other novel, the much-admired The Last Samurai. here it is more pointed, and less studied, throughout one hears echoes from annual reports and other such business communiques. i did grow tired of her repeated use of the term "aggro" to describe the top-selling (white, straight, and male of course, since this is corporate america's ruling elite) salesmen who apparently have only two settings: rut or shill. does this betray my age? when did "aggro" replace "macho"? but hey, i dislike the usage of "resto" and "recco" as well, so maybe it's just a "o" thing.

lightning successfully channels dewitt's concentrated thumbing of her nose at the machine that runs the world not only in satire and language but also by populating her book with the caricatures of people who either use the service or work within it, people that one might recognize from any office: we all know lucilles, and renees, and elaines, the ed wilsons, and of course, the roys from HR. joe's lofty side business providing all kinds of ingenious and hilarious flush flourishes was a highlight in this fun satirical slight over-long fantasy that aptly displays dewitt's sense of humour and versatility. please ma'am, could i have some more?

[Kelly (and the Book Boar) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Find all of my reviews at: http://52bookminimum.blogspot.com/

Joe, stuck in a dead-end job selling vacuum cleaners, spends most of his days perfecting his masturbatory fantasies. In an effort to “build a better mousetrap,” Joe comes up with an ingenious method of eliminating sexual harassment claims in the workplace. The idea? Lightning Rods. Women, who on the surface appear to be perfectly capable/qualified support staff, but are also willing to take one for the team, if you will.

I love good satire. A little darkness, some taboo – I feed on books like that every once in a while. Sadly, Lightning Rods missed the mark. The idea behind the book is one of sheer genius and there are brilliant moments when you hear a snippet of what became of characters or ideas that were laugh out loud funny. Unfortunately, they were literally moments. Ms. DeWitt gets so bogged down in the invention process that she fails to develop a main character that you know much of anything about and the remaining cast of characters are nearly as invisible as the converted bathroom stalls from which they emerge to serve their purpose as Lightning Rods.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was prepared to be grossed out by this book. I only read it because it was on the Tournament of Books list, pitted against Salvage the Bones, of all things. After all, reading about a loser who turns his sexual fantasies into a profitable business is not something a self-respecting feminist does.

Who knew that Helen DeWitt has actually created a feminist attack on not only sexual exploitation but also sales as a profession, corporate life, men in general, and much more. She did this without preaching or moralizing, without stridency and with hilarity and great insight.

She probably didn't plan it that way, but she has contributed to my inadvertent 2012 study of satire. If you enjoy a good satire, this is one of a select few.

Joe is a failed salesman who is sitting around doing what bored male losers often do when he gets a lightning bolt to his deadened mind. The result is Lightning Rods, a business which provides anonymous sexual relief throughout the working day to alpha-male employees, thereby saving employers from those dreaded sexual harassment suits.

DeWitt creates this voice, which she gives to Joe and almost everyone else; a sort of deadpan, cliched speak which always begins with "the way I see it is..." Somehow she manages to keep it up throughout the novel without it being annoying. In fact, it becomes part of the hilarity.

Whenever Joe gets stumped he calls in Lucille, one of his lightning rods, who always comes up with a good solution. By the end of the story several women have saved Joe's career, income, and business many times over.

The way I see it is, this book is not for everyone. Judging from some of the reviews, including those of the TOB judge and commentators (all male), I don't think a lot of readers actually get it. If you are squeamish about sex as a commodity, or about sex in general, or if you like your sex combined with romance, Lightning Rods is probably not the book for you.

If however you enjoy seeing male chauvinist pigs taking it in the you-know-where, along with Big Business, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the Christian Right, give it a try. I'm glad I did and I doubt I will ever forget it.

[Katerina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Big cleaning time!
Kept coming back to this one but today finally decided to admit defeat and wipe it out from my memory. Sometimes you just have to.

[Jenny (Reading Envy)]

I heard about this in the commentary for the Super Rooster and someone said I'd either love or hate it... it's not hitting right for me but that's satire/"comedy" for you.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very different fare from The Last Samurai. Part satire of corporate America, part surreal Horatio Alger tale, Lightning Rods pivots on a horny failed salesman who finds a way to adapt his sexual fantasies into a business model. Funny and likable enough to sustain its strange conceit - I finished this in one shortish plane ride. Having spent a few tortuous years in business school, I know how close to the truth its cranky social psychology really is.

[Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was probably funnier if you read it back in 1999. The final payoff feels like a hot take on Bill Clinton’s romantic affairs that were dominating the national conversation at the time. Otherwise read over a quarter of a century later you are reminded that our comedic sensibilities have evolved over the years. It’s kind of like going back to watch Borat or the first season of South Park, you remember why it was funny at the time but we can’t go back to those simpler tastes any longer.

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend of mine, whom I very much respect, told me this wasn't very good. Here's my suspicion: if you've read 'The Last Samurai,' which I have not, and you come to this book expecting something moving and tender, you'll probably hate it. It's like taking a swig of cola, only it isn't cola, it's bourbon. Nasty. But if you're expecting bourbon... that can be very pleasant.

Like bourbon, this book is more about stripping paint than nourishing or softly soothing. It's funny and gross, but also very, very clever: DeWitt de-eroticizes fantasy and sex, and in doing so should make you very uncomfortable about the world you live in, which itself does a good job of de-eroticizing fantasy and sex. In place of a plot - you know, human interaction, individuals making decisions based on a range of considerations, and so on - this book has an unfolding, perfectly rational thought. What *would* happen if someone set up a sex-service for businesses' best salesmen? Probably something like this, which reveals a lot about the world we live in: the dominance of political correctness over morality, the priority of profit, the debased attitude we have towards other people, art and generally anything that makes life worth living. It's perfectly rational (according to one kind of rationality). But it's not pretty.

And DeWitt also nails Men in general. I think we probably deserve it.

[Elaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

A competently written clever satire (once you get past the ick factor of offices providing women to have faceless sex through holes in the bathroom wall in order to avoid sexual harassment suits). However, there was about 50 pages of material here and the novel loses its piquancy as well as its power to shock long before it's over. The last few chapters in particular felt meandering and slapdash and the novel just sort of peters out.

[Prometheus · Rating 4 out of 5]

The surefire sign you are in the hands of a master is if her novel exhausts all the intellectual possibilities of the situation she has devised, or, to put it another way, the novel leaves no intellectual stone unturned. Most novels don't come close. Most novels don't even try. Helen DeWitt's LIGHTNING RODS, however, succeeds in doing just that.

Does this mean the book is perfect, that it has no errors to its name? No, not by a long shot, but the errors, as happens in all great literature, add rather than detract from the work. For example, throughout the work the narrator (presumably working as the protagonist's mind) makes numerous dubious remarks about human nature, specifically the nature of the male of the species. Some of these are so egregious one might want to write the book off as sexist, in the same way many feminist critics over the years have written off so many of the classics. But that's to miss the point. Rather than irritate, the errors oblige the reader to think, they engage the reader in such a way that he or she cannot but think about human nature in a way that he or she might never have before, merely because he or she has never had reason to. Throughout the novel, I found myself thinking, "Well, no, not all men think or behave that way, or at any rate, I certainly don't," and after each such thought I found myself contemplating how I myself do in fact behave or think given the presented context. And that's what great literature does, it makes you think, even when it does something ridiculous, or perhaps especially when it does. And though DeWitt is no Tolstoy, no George Eliot, not even Faulkner, her small masterpiece does in fact warrant the qualification of great literature. Read it for the humor, read it for the errors, but by all means, read it.

[Max Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is profoundly and admirably stupid. I’d recommend this to anyone who finds Connor O’Malley, Paul Beatty, or Todd Solondz funny. Loved it!

Also, shoutout New Directions. I realized midway through this book that they published a solid handful of the books I’ve loved this year. Hell yeah!

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was chuckling out loud the whole time I was reading this. That was an issue because then people would ask “what are you reading” and then I would have to explain the plot of this book. I guess I could have made something up or been vaguer but I’m kinda like Amelia Bedelia in that I’m too literal even in times where it would be wise not to be.

This book is about a failing vacuum cleaner salesman named Joe who is plagued by his sexual fantasies that involve a sort of glory hole situation where it’s the top half of a woman on one side of a hole cut out, and the bottom half is available for a guy to. Relieve himself of his urges. Joe always gets carried away fixating on the logistics involved, like making the hole adjustable depending on the user’s height, until he’s not even thinking about the sex part any longer. It’s hard to explain. There’s technically a ton of sex in the book but it’s the least erotic book possible, becuase the whole point is to satirize the commodification of women and sex etc etc.

Anyway Joe gets this business idea that he could put these facilities in offices, so the high powered businessmen have somewhere to release their urges so that they stop sexually harassing their coworkers. The logic here is that the type of guy who is on his grindset and a huge asset to the company is also the type of guy who has an overpowered sex drive that is a major liability to the company. Joe’s company will provide “lightning rods” to solve this problem. The women involved are completely anonymous and are also full-fledged employees of the office, thereby “protecting their dignity” and preventing workplace drama. The facilities are a smashing success, albeit with some hiccups, and it escalates until the FBI is installing them in every government building up to the white house.

The book is hilarious and written in a tone mocking the Six Sigma Selling motivational novels I was trying to explain in my review of Midnight Library. (note to self I gotta read one of those someday just so I can get the full picture.) Half the sentences start with “The way I see it is,” or “The thing to remember is,”. I love a workplace satire. It was right up my alley and I loved the overall ridiculousness except for one paragraph’s joke that I felt was really toeing the line and in my mind taking it too far. (The part with Renee, specifically page 174. In general I read Renee’s situation/character as critical of the way things are, mocking the ways corporations deal with race just as the book mocks the way the corporate world views women, but that one paragraph I was like this whole storyline could still make its points without including this). But other than that I thought this was excellent. This book is over 20 years old. It would be very funny to see how a 2022 version would play out because Equity & Inclusion + anti sexual harassment in the workplace is more of a conversation than ever. I’m sure someone is already writing it

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of like if that god-awful Charlie Kaufman novel from last year was Actually funny and clever! I laughed a lot and there's a lot of sneaky playing with form (it's written like a fake self-help/motivational business book). Ultimately it's missing the magic spark and sense of ambition that made The Last Samurai maybe the best book I've ever read (!!) but that feels almost unfair because they're such different books. This is much more in the market to just be a filthy horny & totally absurd satire on vapid inspirational/aspirational books written by "entrepreneurs," and for that I had a very good time.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

So then but true this was a fine relief after coming off of DeWitt's very disappointing recent collection of short stuff. But too, I mean, the whole of this just felt like a mere additional thread/tangent/storyline/sustained=sexual=fantasy which might have been cut from IJ. And it really doesn't help to go from this kind of writing to the total baroque=density of something like Fado Alexandrino. I think the contrast though clearly delineates the distinction between storying and noveling.

Buy Helen a coffee ::
https://ko-fi.com/dewitt

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first half is a smart and funny satire on Yankee ingenuity, business and other clichés, political correctness and Puritanism, and more. DeWitt bravely tries to broaden the focus and keep it interesting, but the second half is more clever than smart, and is even dull in places (but still with touches of genius). This is the rare novel that only a woman could have written, and it was brave of DeWitt to take a stab.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is pretty out of hand, and I mean that as a total compliment. I want to go out to dinner with Helen DeWitt and pick her mesmerizing brain. She's an utter original, and how often do you really get to say that?

[Stany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant. And so politically incorrect it is an real joy to read. Helen DeWitt’s two novels (this one and the Last Samurai) have been some of the best surprises I have read in the last few years. I find her, without a doubt, one of the most original writers of our times.

[Danger · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought this was absolutely hysterical. A mediocre vacuum salesman decides to solve sexual harassment in the workplace with the most insane plan possible, and the entire novel consists of mitigating the further problems that spiral from that. The whole thing plays out like an extended Nathan For You episode. Deadpan satire of office culture and the capitalist mindset that enables the worst of us to succeed. Loved it!

[christa · Rating 4 out of 5]

It shouldn’t be an awkward thing to explain to my hair guy the plot of Helen Dewitt’s novel “Lightning Rods.” For one thing, he has just spent the trimming process going into moderate detail about his current dating life and the highlighting process talking about the time when he was 27 and fell into a relationship with a woman nearly twice his age who confessed to him that she hadn’t slept with anyone in 10 years.

But here I am, backed head first into a sink, my face Prude Purple. The team one sink away is just a little too close, the sound system’s music a little too quiet, for me to comfortably get to the key plot points: A man who invents a Workplace Sexual Harassment Deflection system that goes like this:

1. Businessman sits in his cubicle working on his computer.
2. Notification pops up on screen inviting man to the handicap stall of the workplace bathroom.
3. Once inside, a panel opens in the wall and here comes the bottom half of an anonymous naked woman, dubbed a Lightning Rod. Condoms are dispensed nearby.
4. Said man then has sex with the anonymous woman.
5. Woman is rolled back to the women’s bathroom side, panel shuts, man returns to his workspace invigorated by the sexual release.

The outcome: Higher productivity, less sick leave, no threat of sexual harassment suits from randy men, out of control with sexual urges, dishing unwanted advances to the women on staff. As if explaining the plot isn’t awkward enough, explaining why this isn’t book isn’t shit -- that it is in fact funny, satire, akin to “The Canterbury Tales” in some ways -- is another animal. Most people don’t want to listen to book talk long enough to hear this part, I’ve found. Book plot summaries as casual conversation with casual readers have an interest time limit similar to the amount of time allowed to deconstruct a dream. I’d be better off just saying: “It’s about a guy. An ‘idea’ man. It’s funny.”

Joe is an encyclopedia salesman who eventually shifts to vacuum cleaners and finds himself in a Florida town recently ravaged by a hurricane where all the residents already have and love the machine he is trying to sell. When he goes door-to-door trying to sell the cleaner, he is invited inside, fed pie and the owners of the vacuum wax lovingly about their relationship with the Electrolux. In between non-sales, Joe chills in his trailer mentally engaged in an elaborate fantasy involving a woman half clothed, half not, leaning over a table or out a window. The naked part is being penetrated, while the clothed part is doing nothing to reveal what is happening. He takes it even further, turning the scene into a game show that plays in his head. That’s when he realizes he could use this interest, turn it into a reality. A real service.

He finds women that are proficient in office duties, women who can type a lot of words per minute and understand the details of working as a personal assistant or secretary. The women form a sort of temp agency. They are swapped into the staff, paid well, and throughout the day they might leave their chair a few times to service the faceless dudes, then return to their office work. One woman, who is saving up money to go to Harvard Law School, considers it just an extension of going to the bathroom. No bigger deal than flushing a tampon. It’s just a body, right? And she’s making a lot of money. Another Lightning Rod uses the time spent in the stall to read Proust in French. She, too, is saving for law school and building a bigger brain.

Complications arise, of course, and Joe tweaks the system. He solves the problem of Equal Opportunity Employment and he comes up with a way to make bathrooms accessible for people of all sizes. Meanwhile, he’s got other inventions in the works.

A few years ago during NaNoWriMo I tried to write something in the genre of Funny Porn for Smart people and while this isn’t exactly porn, it is the exact pitch I had hoped (but failed) to hit. This somewhat absurd, but also not very absurd, bit of satire. Dewitt has done something really interesting with this novel and it’s original concept, quirky character sketches and thorough round of the “What if-skies.”

[Jessica Sullivan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This quirky workplace satire was written in 2009, but feels especially relevant in the #MeToo era.

Joe is a failed salesman with a lot of weird sexual fantasies. Lo and behold, one day he has an idea to transform one of his fantasies into a controversial solution for combatting sexual harassment in the workplace: he calls them “lightning rods,” and they’re women who are hired to provide sexual release for the most important male employees, the logic being that the men can now perform better at work and the company won’t have to worry about pesky lawsuits.

Clearly this is an outrageous concept, and that’s definitely the whole point. The thing is, it takes off, and Joe becomes wildly successful. This is a book that makes you cringe, as does most satire that seems all too plausible.

DeWitt’s writing is fresh and hilarious, reminding me at times of George Saunders and David Foster Wallace. Her use of the omniscient narrator is perfect for really highlighting Joe’s strangeness and the absurdity of the whole plot.

If I were judging this on the prose and characters alone, I would rate it higher, but unfortunately the plot itself does become rather redundant as we follow Joe making improvements and new iterations of the lighting rod proposal.

I’m grateful that this book introduced me to DeWitt, whose writing I will definitely continue to seek out.

[Stephen Goldenberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Satirical novels are very difficult to pull off successfully. It’s that mix of poker-faced seriousness and dark humour that is so difficult to achieve. Helen DeWitt’s satire on American entrepreneurial capitalism and sexual relations starts with an outrageous idea but she’s hard pressed to maintain the satirical tone over a 340 page novel.
Having failed as a salesman of encyclopaedias and vacuum cleaners, Joe comes up with an outrageously bad taste idea to solve the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace. What DeWitt does well is to treat the idea seriously and make its initial success believable by explaining in detail how all the possible drawbacks can be overcome. Here, she draws on the master of the oeuvre, Jonathan Swift, and his’A Modest Propoal’ where he takes the proposal for the poor to sell their children for food seriously by explaining exactly how it would work economically. DeWitt does the same for Joe’s proposal but the difference is that Swift’s work was a 15 page essay and not a whole novel.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

First-rate social satire, if you can get past the ick factor of the premise. I'm glad I did. I was not planning to read this, although I loved Helen DeWitt's "The Last Samurai," because I was creeped out by the concept. I ended up listening to an audio recording, which was great because the reader's voice was perfect for the main character. This book does what satire should do, which is examine a social problem and then push it to a ridiculous extreme. And push some more. I was walking in my neighborhood LAUGHING OUT LOUD while listening to this. Just when I thought it could not get crazier, DeWitt somehow found more crazy. It was HILARIOUS and SMART and ENTERTAINING and THOUGHT-PROVOKING. I recommend it. Really. Just don't get hung up on the premise and you'll get used to it pretty quickly.