Lightning Rods

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More About This Book

Overview

Described as “the most well-executed literary sex comedy” of our time by Salon.com, and “a wickedly smart satire that deserves to be a classic” by Bookforum, Helen DeWitt’s Lighting Rods is a novel that will leave you laughing for more. Follow one steady rise to power in corporate America as down-and-out salesman Joe curtails sexual harassment in the office and increases productivity with his mysterious, mind-blowing invention.

Editorial Reviews

Critical Mob
“Intelligent, funny, and absurd, Lightning Rods critiques contemporary perspectives on sex, capitalist logic, and the workplace.”
Edmonton Journal
“We've known for a decade that DeWitt was a great writer - now we know there are at least two different great writers lurking within her. What her third book will look like is almost literally anyone's guess.”
More Reviews (13) Fewer Reviews
New York Observer
“Lightning Rods is an exercise in novel as extrapolation. Ms. Dewitt’s method is to introduce a device into the world as we know it and systematically explore how the world reacts to that device. Joe’s original moment of epiphany is almost superfluous; the real fun results once the idea exists and must be dealt with.
Ms. Dewitt creates the problems, identifies the problems, and then figures out how to solve them. It’s an appealingly practical way to think about writing fiction, and one that ignores any distinction between realism and fantasy.”
New Yorker
“This is excellent: cold and crazy...The jokes are like hammers.”
Ploughshares
“Delivered with a teeth-baring grin, DeWitt’s book is a powerful corrective for any reader who believes America has moved beyond Mad Men paternalism and achieved real gender equality.”
Rain Taxi
“Satire and comedy traditionally have the advantage of allowing an author to develop ridiculous premises to absurd lengths, and DeWitt follows the logic of her premise all the way. She winks at her reader here and there but mostly adopts a mock earnest tone, which is a shrewd move. Her many cliché-ridden passages justifying the Lightning Rods are argued with such force and conviction, the reader begins to envision certain real-world businesses giving the green light to such a project. The result is a book that manages to be titillating and breezy even as it hides a clusterbomb of social commentary under its glittering, aphoristic surface.”
The Awl
“It's an altogether different piece of writing: a sharp satirical fable that provides strong supporting evidence in favor of the proposition,
as Marco Roth once put it to me, that DeWitt is 21st-century America’s best 18th-century novelist.”
The Boston Globe
“The Last Samurai made DeWitt a household name for its audacity; Lightning Rods, written a decade before Samurai, inverts the Willy Loman myth by giving us a salesman with a sexual fantasy instead of a dream,
who succeeds in selling his own personal kink as the solution to workplace sexual harassment.”
The L Magazine
“Unlike many works of satire, Lightning Rods features no characters who abstain from the Kool-Aid; no wisecracking Yossarin or prophetic Kilgore Trout to alert us to the absurdity of the world the author has created. DeWitt seems happy to leave such questioning to her readers. Joe never reconsiders his narrow definition of success as satiated desire and positive cash flow—indeed, there's little reason why he should, based on DeWitt's shiny, happy characterizations of the lightning rods and their users.
Whether this hegemony adds another layer of absurdity and an extra bite or unnecessarily reduces the complexity and humanity of the story is, then,
subject for each reader to consider.”
The Wall Street Journal
“She also lampoons the pabulum of business motivational books and the pieties of CEO memoirs in a book that is consistently funny in its stomach-turning way. (In her acknowledgments, Ms. DeWitt thanks the person who introduced her to "The Producers.") The key to her satire is a disdain for the business world expressed with such purity that it achieves a sort of euphoria.”
Library Journal
Had I not known the author's name, I would have never guessed that DeWitt wrote this work. I would have sworn it was written by a middle-aged man with considerable sales experience. Whereas her previous novel, The Last Samurai, was a delightful hodgepodge, a Tower of Babel of a book, here the story is very straightforward. Joe is a failed salesman with a persistent erotic fantasy I found amusing but not a bit erotic—a "turnoff" in fact. He bases a system designed to end sexual harassment in the workplace on hiring "lightning rods," women who in addition to regular office work also service several employees each day. He claims it is not prostitution but becomes nervous when visited by the FBI, until he realizes they also want to use their own version of it. Soon, Christian businesses are adding their own twist. VERDICT This is not for everyone (you needn't be a prude to find it offensive), but for those with the properly twisted sense of sexual humor this book is a total hoot. Recommended for academic and public libraries and all stripes of perverts.—Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. Lib., Chico
Kirkus Reviews
DeWitt's offbeat debut (The Last Samurai, 2000) caused a stir, but this second novel, a satirical take on sexual harassment, misfires badly. Joe has tried selling encyclopedias and failed. Same for vacuum cleaners. He tells himself to get a grip. He's in his 30s (that's all we know about him) and is a manifest loser, but with the help of an expensive suit he turns his life around, persuading a company to try his concept of lightning rods. Bona-fide female staff members will provide occasional sexual services to male employees. They will be randomly selected through a computer program, and their anonymity protected. The point? To stave off sexual harassment lawsuits by providing relief. Sex-and-the-office entertainments have an impressive history, from Billy Wilder's classic 1960 movie The Apartment to the current TV hit Mad Men, but these shows involve flesh-and-blood characters. DeWitt's dubious premise is that harassment is caused solely by high testosterone levels; she excludes the urge to dominate. Just insert a panel opening in the Disabled Toilet, have the guy enter the "gal" from behind and voilà. Don't expect any frissons from their contact. The first guy, DeWitt writes coyly, "availed himself of the facility." But the "installation" works, and not just for Ed, the prime stud; the harassment ends, along with DeWitt's powers of invention. After Joe has a chance meeting with a dwarf on an airport shuttle bus, DeWitt riffs on adjustable height toilets; there's even a moment of toilet farce when the obese HR guy comes between Ed and his lightning rod. There are a few wrinkles (a black employee must be accommodated to prevent discrimination charges, the FBI must be mollified) but no drama in this lifeless work. Even when Joe invites his most free-spirited lightning rod home to his loft, there's no action. A dreary screed that too often reads like a primer for salesmen.
Jennifer Szalai
…a funny, filthy volume…DeWitt…is willing to take her satire as far as it will go, giving us the freedom to read it (or even misread it) as we choose…DeWitt, whose interest in languages was apparent in The Last Samurai, has adopted here the idiom of America's pragmatic temper, and the story of Joe and his business plan shows how a fetish for common sense can make for silly, sleazy extremes. The basic premise for Lightning Rods is so audacious that it might be hard to get past its general conceit, but its true brilliance lies in DeWitt's careful deployment of language so common that we no longer see it.
—The New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly
A vacuum-cleaner salesman hits on a tasteless business plan to allow working men a sexual release at the office in this perversely surreal second novel by Dewitt (The Last Samurai). Joe doesn’t have what it takes to sell Electrolux in Eureka, Fla., but inspiration strikes in the form of a sexual fantasy involving bottomless women viewed through a hole in a wall. Since Joe believes that human nature can’t be contained, even in an office, he establishes a startup that offers to establish a monetized glory hole in any office, wherein a secretarial pool of “lightning rods” have anonymous sex through the wall of an office’s disabled bathroom. Lightning rods are carefully selected, well paid, protected from discovery and abuse; their services offer a useful “release for any pent-up physical needs,” boost performance, and suppress absenteeism, and allow Joe to sidestep issues of sexual harassment. Joe secures several top-drawer morally expedient and aspirational “gals” like Lucille, later a successful litigation lawyer, and future Supreme Court Justice Renee, and finds his innovative employment agency taking off in a big way. Dewitt’s parody of the corporate model is so resolutely poker-faced and mirthless that it simply feels deadly. (Oct.)
The Barnes & Noble Review

Like relationships, books can uncover knots in our psyches that might otherwise have remained obscured. Using myself as an example, I noticed that when speaking to friends about Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods, the word "fun" leaped to mind but slipped out bashfully through my lips. To what extent a streak of literary Puritanism burns within me, I cannot fully compass. Admittedly, "fun" is not a word that I'm used to deploying in a review. Yet, there is no denying that DeWitt's third novel — an office satire about a plucky entrepreneur named Joe who transforms an erotic fantasy into the idea behind a multimillion-dollar company — is the most well executed literary sex comedy that I've come across in ages; just the thing to lighten a subway commute or add zest to a lunch break.

"We have to deal with people the way they are, not how we'd like them to be" is an adage that recurs throughout the book. And so Joe, a frustrated door-to-door salesman given to fantasizing about furtive sexual encounters, strikes upon the concept of helping businesses diffuse sexual tensions in the office through an ingenious system for anonymous assignations — a high-tech update of the glory hole. Joe sells his idea by appealing to his prospective clients' common sense:

Speaking as a businessman...I know that it is often the most valuable individuals in a company who present the greatest vulnerability to sexual harassment related issues. We know that a high level of testosterone is inseparable from the drive that produces results. Speaking of people as they are rather than as they should be I know that a high-testosterone-level individual has a high likelihood of being sexually aggressive; if the individual is working twenty-hour days as a driven results-oriented individual often does, that sexual aggression will find an outlet in the office...I have strong views on sexual harassment. I believe that those in a place of work who do not welcome sexual advances should not be subjected to them. I also believe that a man who is producing results in today's competitive market place has a right to be protected from potential undesirable side effects of the physical constitution which enables him to make a valued contribution to the company.
DeWitt has a field day sending up the lingo of business culture. Somber topics like sexual harassment and the Equal Employment Opportunities Act collapse into stitches before her crisply turned out prose. Lightning Rods is A Modest Proposal for our sexually emancipated age. The only guilt involved in this pleasure will come to those who miss it.

Christopher Byrd is a writer who lives in New York. His reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The American Prospect, The Believer, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Wilson Quarterly.

Reviewer: Christopher Byrd

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780811219433
  • Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • Publication date: 10/5/2011
  • Pages: 192
  • Sales rank: 125,731
  • Product dimensions: 5.70 (w) x 8.10 (h) x 1.10 (d)

Meet the Author

Helen DeWitt is the author of a “remarkable first novel” (Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Review of Books), The Last Samurai, which has been translated into twenty languages. She lives in Berlin.

Customer Reviews

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Sort by: Showing all of 2 Customer Reviews

  • Posted April 5, 2012

    I Also Recommend:

    2940014323642

    Goofy, but Funny

    Basically, this is a novel about a guy who decides to put glory holes into offices as a way of reducing sexual frustration and thereby reduce sexual harassment. If this description sounds like something you'd be interested in reading, then you'll like the book. If it isn't, you won't.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Anonymous

    Posted March 29, 2012

    No text was provided for this review.

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