Lightning Rods

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.

November 1, 2011
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.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 15, 2011

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

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2011
Joe's talent lies in seeing people as they are, not as he would like them to be. So when he fails as a salesman of Encyclopaedia Britannica and Electrolux vacuum cleaners, he turns his sex fantasy of encountering a woman from behind as she leans out a window into a technique for quelling sexual harassment and increasing productivity in the workplace. He provides what he calls lightning rods, women whose job descriptions and wages are beyond that of routine personal assistants, to provide men with a totally confidential means of having sex during the workday to reduce their testosterone-fueled aggression. Two women help improve the system. Lucille earns enough to go to Harvard Law and become a millionaire litigator, and Renee institutes affirmative action and reads A la recherche du temps perdu in French during her lightning-rod stints. Meanwhile, Joe invents the adjustable toilet and deals with threats from competitors, the FBI, and Christians offended by the lightning-rod concept. DeWitt (The Last Samurai, 2002) offers an original, sometimes titillating, exploration of human nature and American initiative.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)