Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2012 March 16 • Friday

"One way of looking at it is that it was just an unfortunate by-product of Hurricane Edna."

That's the first line of Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods, a brilliant American satire. There aren't too many satires these days. I have trouble thinking of any, let alone good ones. Parody or teasing is much more common.

Lightning Rods is funny and sharp without being vicious. It's about a bottoming-out (pun intended for those who've read the book) salesman named Joe who, in the midst of a recurring sexual fantasy, realizes that the way to stop sexual harrassment in the workplace is to offer anonymous sex on demand for those men most "at risk" of sexually harrassing female employees.

Once Joe gets his foot in the door, the idea takes off. It's a huge success and has obvious value outside the business world: the FBI wants Joe's "lightning rods" in the offices of elected politicians and the big religions want them in their churches.

You'll have to discover the details of Joe's service for yourselves. But if you like, say, the original BBC The Office and Donald E. Westlake's comic crime novels, you'll probably enjoy Lightning Rods, which has a tone that's reminiscent of both. And Dewitt's poker-faced lampooning of the inanities of blinkered American business-speak and its endless capacity for rationalization is brilliantly sustained throughout.