LIGHTNING RODS

I suppose you could say Helen Dewitt’s Lightning Rods is a dirty book. Deliciously, scrupulously dirty. But I wouldn’t say that. True, it has the tang of illicit sex. There are vivid descriptions of sexual logistics. There is even a wee bit of peeing involved. But what Lightning Rods really is is a hilarious satire on offices, not orifices. Unless you like, er, love, sentences like (and I do! I do!), “What do you say to someone if there is a one in five chance that you have had a close encounter of a ventro-dorsal nature  through the wall of a disabled toilet?”

That is the plot of the book: Joe, a failed encyclopedia and vacuum cleaner salesman, has sexual fantasies about screwing women from behind. In his failure he lies in a trailer in Florida elaborating on these fantasies. He realizes that there is something tantalizing about not being able to see the face of the woman. He imagines her leaning out of a window, her bottom half naked, her top clothed. The anonymity is erotically powerful. He then realizes that corporations spend millions of dollars a year on sexual harassment suits. Why not provide a service: anonymous sex through a hole in the wall, to high earning corporate men? Like a lightning rod the faceless woman would drain them of their sexual energy. Hence they can focus on work, not harassing women. It would be both a reward for high performance, and a way to manage aggressive, type A sexual personalities. A computer program would randomly pair anonymous men with anonymous women. The women would be hired for both their office skills and their desire to earn the bonus being a lightning rod brings. So Joe invents the transporter. It is installed between the men’s and women’s room. A woman climbs onto the transporter, naked from the waist down, and it transports her bottom half through the wall into the other stall. He redesigns disabled toilets and persuades a CEO to try out his system. The rest is pure American magic.

Written in the idiotic idiom of corporate America, and told from Joe’s point of view, the book is almost a bland exploration of the logistics and consequences of this idea. I laughed out loud on nearly every page. Besides Joe there are Lucille and Renee, high-powered, intelligent women who decide to become Lightning Rods to pay for Harvard law school. There is a big dick named Ed who falls in love with a Lightning Rod named Elaine. Neither knows they’ve had ‘ventro-dorsal’ relations with the other, since the service is anonymous.

I wouldn’t dismiss the book as a big joke. It’s hard to speak about it being serious, but like all good satire it takes huge bites out of the rotten apple that is America. And this is both serious, and pleasurable, literary business

Dewitt worked in a lot of offices. In one interview she said that her experience with trying to get her first novel published was like getting fucked from behind through a hole in the wall. Beneath the banal harmony of mixed metaphors and inane observation is the steady beat of a contemptuous intelligence. Not bristling with anger but giggling, howling, smiling, snorting laughter. I suppose there is even a touch of affection here: for the ever optimistic Joe, for Lucille, and especially, the OCD Renee, future Supreme Court justice. It is Renee who takes the job after realizing that she could learn to read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in French, using a dictionary and translation, while lying face down on the transporter. It is through Renee that the reader hears the voice and mind of Sibylla, from The Last Samurai. I wish Dewitt had 5 or 10 more books on the shelves. She says more books are on the way. Please let it be so.