Lightning Rods
Helen DeWitt
(Author)
Description
"All I want is to be a success. That's all I ask." Joe fails to sell a single set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in six months. Then fails to sell a single Electrolux and must eat 126 pieces of homemade pie, served up by his would-be customers who feel sorry for him. Holed up in his trailer, Joe finds an outlet for his frustrations in a series of ingenious sexual fantasies, and at last strikes gold. His brainstorm, Lightning Rods, Inc., will take Joe to the very top -- and to the very heart of corporate insanity -- with an outrageous solution to the spectre of sexual harassment in the modern office.An uproarious, hard-boiled modern fable of corporate life, sex, and race in America, Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods brims with the satiric energy of Nathanael West and the philosophic import of an Aristophanic comedy of ideas. Her wild yarn is second cousin to the spirit of Mel Brooks and the hilarious reality-blurring of Being John Malkovich. Dewitt continues to take the novel into new realms of storytelling -- as the timeliness of Lightning Rods crosses over into timelessness.
Product Details
Price
$24.95
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
October 05, 2011
Pages
275
Dimensions
5.7 X 1.13 X 8.09 inches | 0.96 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780811219433
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About the Author
Helen DeWitt was born in a suburb of Washington, DC. Daughter of American diplomats, she grew up mainly in Latin America, living in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. She went to Oxford to study classics for a BA and D.Phil. She left academia to try to write a novel, moving eventually to London and acquiring UK citizenship. She had some 100 fragments of novels when she began work in 1995 on the novel that was published as The Last Samurai in 2000. The book caused a sensation at the Frankfurt Bookfair 1999, going on to be translated in 20 languages (DeWitt reads some 15 languages to various degrees of fluency). On the reissue of The Last Samurai by New Directions in 2016 it was hailed by Vulture Magazine as The Best Book of the Century. She is also the author of Lightning Rods, a Mel Brooksian satire on sexual harassment, and Some Trick, a collection of stories. She has been based in Berlin since 2004, but also spends time at a cottage in the woods of Vermont improving her chainsaw skills.
Reviews
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.-- (11/13/2011)
This is excellent: cold and crazy...The jokes are like hammers.-- (09/26/2011)
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.-- (09/26/2011)
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.-- (09/26/2011)
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.-- (12/07/2011)
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.-- (12/07/2011)
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.-- (12/13/2011)
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.-- (10/27/2017)
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.-- (12/07/2011)
This is excellent: cold and crazy...The jokes are like hammers.-- (09/26/2011)
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.-- (09/26/2011)
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.-- (09/26/2011)
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.-- (12/07/2011)
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.-- (12/07/2011)
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.-- (12/13/2011)
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.-- (10/27/2017)
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.-- (12/07/2011)
