Lightning Rods

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. (c) AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

August 22, 2011
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.