…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.
"In the long-awaited follow-up to Ms. DeWitt’s debut, The Last Samurai , a fickle vacuum cleaner salesman (who isn’t very good at selling vacuum cleaners) finally decides he’s struck gold with his new business venture: a monetized glory hole installed in every office, where a pool of 'lightning rods' has anonymous sex with sexually frustrated employees. Ms. DeWitt’s deadpanned humor makes this slim book into a complex story that works as both surrealist metaphor and corporate parody."
New York Observer - Michael H. Miller
"A tightly disciplined and extremely funny satire on office politics, sexual politics, American politics, and the art of positive thinking."
"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."
"Intelligent, funny, and absurd, Lightning Rods critiques contemporary perspectives on sex, capitalist logic, and the workplace."
"This is excellent: cold and crazy...The jokes are like hammers."
"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."
"This is a perfect example of DeWitt’s uncanny ability to put her finger on the pulse of our many contemporary neuroses and anxieties — about sex, race, disability, and whatnot... DeWitt is not interested in being a moralist; this is not a comedy of correction... like Nabokov’s Humbert trying to convince us of the allure of a pubescent girl, it’s also scarily persuasive."
Open Letters Monthly - Morten Høi Jensen
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"An absurdist comedy of the American workplace and the indignities faced by employees in today's turbo-capitalism, a quietly seething feminist critique of pornography and the commodification of women, and a category-defying fable about the meaninglessness of success."
"DeWitt’s wickedly smart satire deserves to be a classic. As I was writing this review, I came across critic Walter Kirn’s recent rereading of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 on its fiftieth birthday. Kirn writes: 'There are no more Joseph Hellers, no more glorious literary crusaders who can ambush and sack, all alone, immense and intimidating social edifices. That demolition job’s been done, that project is complete.' But DeWitt gives plenty of reason to believe that there’s still ambushing to be done."
Bookforum - Rhonda Lieberman
"Dewitt maintains a strong, clear, narrative voice throughout, pitch-perfectly parodying management speak, corporate culture and self-help bibles."
"Standing athwart the arc of literary history — uninterested in sugarcoating her interest in complex systems — DeWitt is among those novelists who long for a return to formality, who dream of constructing beautiful, new, arbitrary systems. She wants to tell us all about them. She thinks her readers might enjoy working their brains a bit. DeWitt delights in language not just as a means to communicate but as a complicated game whose rules she might plumb and master."
"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. As any million-dollar litigation lawyer or two-cent literary critic will tell you, the devil is in the details."
The New York Times Book Review - Jennifer Szalai
"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."
"A razor-sharp comic masterpiece."
"Lightning Rods [is] Helen DeWitt’s merrily demented satire of the obtuse sexual politics of American corporate culture. Brazen, outrageous, and—the key to good satire—just plausible enough to give it the bite of truth. It made me cringe; it made me blush; but mainly it made me laugh. This week, I read Lightning Rods again, and was struck by the degree to which it seems, in our post-Harvey Weinstein world, where each day brings new revelations of egregious male misbehavior, like a work of credible realism."
The Sexual Harrassment Satire to Read in a Post-Harvey Weinstein World - The New Yorker - Alexandra Schwartz
"This is not to say that Lightning Rods shares that novel's epic sweep. It is, by design, a minor work... But it so emphatically aces the tasks it sets for itself, and delivers such a jolt of pleasure along the way, that it reminds me of just how major a minor work can be. I wish the other leading American novelists would produce more books in this vein. Come to think of it, I wish Helen DeWitt would, too. At any rate, as one of her endearingly flummoxed characters might say, I literally cannot wait to see what she does next."
The Millions - Garth Risk Hallberg
"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."
A 2011 editor's choice. - Audible.com
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
A failed encyclopedia and vacuum-cleaner salesman named Joe hits upon a unique moneymaking scheme. His company, Lightning Rods, Inc., offers a form of corporate prostitution: providing female temp workers who are available to relieve male workers’ sexual urges during the workday. Dushko Petrovich narrates in an unrelieved monotone that reflects Joe’s early depression at his inability to succeed in business, no matter how hard he tries. However, Petrovich’s lackluster performance fails to capture the vicious humor or the spirit of Helen DeWitt’s prose. The novel is artful without artifice, unabashedly blunt in all matters sexual, and scathing in its satirical attack on sexual harassment in the workplace. While LIGHTNING RODS isn’t for all listeners, it deserves a stronger narration. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
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.
