Lightning Rods

Like "A Modest Proposal", published just a few years before #MeToo went viral. Nothing like The Last Samurai (which I loved enough to read four times), but that's okay because this is also very good. It's fitting that she credits The Producers and "Springtime for Hitler" as inspiration. I probably won't read this one again, but thinking of certain passages still makes me laugh.

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!

The Last Samurai was genius writing. Lightning Rods not so much. I enjoy the shameless skewering of male oppression as much as anyone, but this is like one good snarky joke being told over and over for hundreds of pages.

Helen Dewitt is one of my favorite authors, I only wish she were more prolific. This book is inventive, surprising, and funny. Sort of a less extravagant and absurd Gore Vidal-esque satire.

Our Protagonist, Joe, has been a failure in life as a salesman at selling Encyclopedia Britannica and Electrolux vacuum cleaners. Then he realizes that to be a successful salesman he needs a product for which there is a natural unsatisfied need, which is how he comes up with his idea for his Lightning Rod employment agency. His agency will provide female employees, who will remain anonymous to both the people using her services and to all the other company employees. These employees not only provide the regular services associated with the job, but also sexual services to star male performers, so that they won't accost other regular female employees, which would instigate multimillion dollar sexual harassment suits. How Joe sells the idea to the job candidates and to the employers is the crux of the story. I have to say I admire the author's imagination in this area. One must engage in a minor suspension of disbelief for the ideas to ring true, but the overall story line is really cute and you want to root for all the characters, especially the former minimum wage office employees and professional escorts, who end up with dignified jobs plus about 60k/year and a chance to better themselves in real jobs. This is humorous fiction but also feel good fiction at the same time.Joe learns to deal with all sorts of problems as the government wanting to use his services to spy on its employees, the minority female with the highest score who Joe initially refuses to hire, since her anonymity would be compromised by the color of her skin, wherein all the other workers are white. It needs to be added here that all sexual alliances are made anonymously through a partition joining the men's and women's restrooms and only the rear end of the women is ever in view. The female author does a great job of explaining how this is possible. Joe also has to deal with a cut-rate competitor who offers a similar product but with lesser quality product [read intellectually and physically lacking in this regard]. The fun part is finding out how Joe manages to solve all these problems, while still not degrading his business by over-sampling his own product. The book isn't for deep intellectualization; it is merely for a fun read and it succeeds at that.

i was so into this book that i couldn't put it down! i have to admit that i rarely read books that have male main characters. i am so into chick lit (of the highest caliber, of course) that i almost passed this book by. i got more than i bargained for; it is just hilarious at parts and is better than anything i have read in a long time.

Helen DeWitt is a writer who can't get no respect. She is a beautiful writer, funny, heartfelt and truly insightful but in this novel, she's chosen an unlikely topic that makes the critics find it hard to give her the praise she richly deserves. Yes, it's a wild topic about women who give sex to office workers but don't let that put you off. DeWitt's sentences are masterful, her plot is intricate, and she has a view deep into the human heart that many "more P.C." writers fail to achieve (Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia, an immature but promising writer, comes to mind). Russell has achieved tons of critical acclaim and prizes; DeWitt? Bupkas. Do NOT miss this. Hilarity will ensue.

Last act left a bit to be desired. Dug it otherwise, very funny.

How well you get on with Lightning Rods is likely to depend on how far you can believe in a world where female employees in large corporations are willing to have sex on demand with successful male employees in return for double pay.The novel is clearly meant to be fantastical. The physical concepts set out in it - disappearing lavatories, partners visible only from the waist down, creating a corporate secret known only to male employees - could never work. This is obviously an ideas book, setting out to challenge ore-conceptions about equal opportunities, diversity and our prudishness towards sex and fidelity. There are some interesting conclusions, but I'm not sure that Helen de Witt ever quite gets the male psyche. In particular, she never seems to grasp men's insatiable demand for novelty.The premise, if anyone is interested, is that Joe is an unsuccessful salesman. After a day of failing to sell encyclopaedias or vacuum cleaners, he returns to his motel room and engages in onanism. We share his fantasies (which are tedious) and his attempts to relate them to the theory of selling. It is a slow and unpleasant start to the novel which will probably deter a good proportion of potential readers. It does improve with time, as plot (Joe looks for ways to muteness his fantasy) starts to do battle with fantasy and sometimes emerges victorious. The narrative voice treads a fine line between being quirky and engaging in irritating prolepsis - often a sign that the author knows the reader's interest is likely to be on the wane.So the plot is pants, the subject matter is unpleasant. Yet there is something in Lightning Rods that does keep the reader going, Perhaps it is the Kafka-esque representation of the workplace; perhaps it is the bizarre logic of applying anti-discrimination policies to something as inherently discriminatory as institutionalised prostitution. But for all the thought that the novel might inspire, it also leaves a somewhat guilty, dirty feeling.On balance, this might scrape to three starts (just) but it is not something I would recommend.

Please, please, Ms DeWitt, write us another novel soon!

Crazy subject matter. I was enthuralled... most entertaining, some what strange, definately original. Very enjoyable. Try it, you too will like it.

Joe starts this novel as an unsuccessful seller of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in MIssouri. He moves to a job selling vacuum cleaners in the nearest Electrolux office. That's in Florida. 'Asked to name a state that's close to Missouri, very few people come up with Florida; those few tend to change their minds when they look at a map. Which just goes to shows how easy it is to be misled by our assumptions'. But as the narrator goes on to point out it's important to give a new job your all and 'you may well find yourself with some debts which it would be distracting to deal with at this time'. So Florida turns out to be 'the nearest Electrolux office that would enable Joe to meet his needs'.If this vignette from the very opening of the novel appeals, you will probably enjoy it all. It's consistently inventive, and the tone of voice is unique. And we see right into the heart and mind of the successful sales person, as he develops a fantasy into a reality and sells that reality to others....The plot does not particularly stack up - but the internal logic is strong and we can see how one thing just leads on to another - and each thing it leads on to is calculated to amuse.

Just ripped through this in a couple of hours without putting it down once!It's actually more thought-provoking than the blurb would suggest, I loved it!