Lightning Rods

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.

Jury is still out on book.

Yes, this is a satire, but good satires have one foot in reality which counterbalances the other. This book doesn't, gets weirder and weirder, and finally spins completely out of control. And I was shocked by the fact that the author used variations of the words "niggle/niggling" repeatedly in the chapter centered on the book's only African-American character--and no where else. Intentional? Subconscious? Where's the editor when he/she is needed?

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!

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 should have been a short story. it runs out of gas very early on and never cashes in on what was a pretty funny premise.

In summary, just read the other one-star reviews because the three posted reflect my thoughts. I am an avid reader and really like books that have unusual characters. And I really enjoy humor. This book is so not funny. It is told in a combination third and second person which really could work were the author capable of creating an interesting story. I readily admit that I didn't finish it. There are plenty of well written novels, and I wasn't about to waste my time on this. I wish I had paid more attention to these one-star evaluations. Reader: Beware!

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.

Hilarious and never bleak (despite the fairly sinister topic). It's also very quotable. Very different from The Last Samurai, but I really enjoyed both!!!

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!

Once you get the basic and rather juvenile conceit the rest of the book becomes rather boring and formulaic, despite the very positive FT recommendation.

I've been eagerly awaiting more from Helen DeWitt since her tour-de-force debut The Last Samurai (still one of my all-time favourites)Lightning Rods was very different but certainly didn't disappoint. Great imagination, great characters and lovely, compelling prose. The topic could have been a bit salacious and grubby, but the way she handles it is thought-provoking in the style of the best satire.More please, Helen!

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.