Lightning Rods: Shortlisted for the 2013 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction Paperback – 15 Sept. 2012

I've been eagerly awaiting more from Helen DeWitt since her tour-de-force debut The Last Samurai (still one of my all-time favourites)Lightning Rods was very different but certainly didn't disappoint. Great imagination, great characters and lovely, compelling prose. The topic could have been a bit salacious and grubby, but the way she handles it is thought-provoking in the style of the best satire.More please, Helen!

Joe starts this novel as an unsuccessful seller of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in MIssouri. He moves to a job selling vacuum cleaners in the nearest Electrolux office. That's in Florida. 'Asked to name a state that's close to Missouri, very few people come up with Florida; those few tend to change their minds when they look at a map. Which just goes to shows how easy it is to be misled by our assumptions'. But as the narrator goes on to point out it's important to give a new job your all and 'you may well find yourself with some debts which it would be distracting to deal with at this time'. So Florida turns out to be 'the nearest Electrolux office that would enable Joe to meet his needs'.If this vignette from the very opening of the novel appeals, you will probably enjoy it all. It's consistently inventive, and the tone of voice is unique. And we see right into the heart and mind of the successful sales person, as he develops a fantasy into a reality and sells that reality to others....The plot does not particularly stack up - but the internal logic is strong and we can see how one thing just leads on to another - and each thing it leads on to is calculated to amuse.

How well you get on with Lightning Rods is likely to depend on how far you can believe in a world where female employees in large corporations are willing to have sex on demand with successful male employees in return for double pay.The novel is clearly meant to be fantastical. The physical concepts set out in it - disappearing lavatories, partners visible only from the waist down, creating a corporate secret known only to male employees - could never work. This is obviously an ideas book, setting out to challenge ore-conceptions about equal opportunities, diversity and our prudishness towards sex and fidelity. There are some interesting conclusions, but I'm not sure that Helen de Witt ever quite gets the male psyche. In particular, she never seems to grasp men's insatiable demand for novelty.The premise, if anyone is interested, is that Joe is an unsuccessful salesman. After a day of failing to sell encyclopaedias or vacuum cleaners, he returns to his motel room and engages in onanism. We share his fantasies (which are tedious) and his attempts to relate them to the theory of selling. It is a slow and unpleasant start to the novel which will probably deter a good proportion of potential readers. It does improve with time, as plot (Joe looks for ways to muteness his fantasy) starts to do battle with fantasy and sometimes emerges victorious. The narrative voice treads a fine line between being quirky and engaging in irritating prolepsis - often a sign that the author knows the reader's interest is likely to be on the wane.So the plot is pants, the subject matter is unpleasant. Yet there is something in Lightning Rods that does keep the reader going, Perhaps it is the Kafka-esque representation of the workplace; perhaps it is the bizarre logic of applying anti-discrimination policies to something as inherently discriminatory as institutionalised prostitution. But for all the thought that the novel might inspire, it also leaves a somewhat guilty, dirty feeling.On balance, this might scrape to three starts (just) but it is not something I would recommend.

Please, please, Ms DeWitt, write us another novel soon!

I should have been better prepared for this by the ham-fisted introduction which attempted to explain what satire was (should anyone be confused that this is what was being attempted). This should have been a clear indication that the writer/publisher wasn't confident in the ability of the book to make this evident by the writing - but I chose to read it anyway.The book has an interesting premise but it fails spectacularly in the writing and it doesn't deliver on the potential of an out of bounds idea. Very disappointing.

This is a satire, which as a concept was good but I struggled to actually find it funny. It reminded me of Mel Brooks who I don't get on with too well either and when there was an acknowledgement to him at the end it was not a big surprise. The second half with all the repercussions of the main concept was entertaining.

I expect that some will enjoy this book but I could not feel at ease with the amoral nature of it's hero. I had to stop reading it before it became a stain in my brain!

A brilliant take on corporate misogyny. The prose is flawless, the characterisation really good. Joe's casual misogyny, his shallowness and his lack of insight into himself is really well drawn. The talented women in the book, the lawyers, the budding CEOs, who want to get to the top in a still male-dominated world know they literally have to 'get screwed' in order to do so and this is their compromise in order to succeed. De Witt slyly depicts the way in which something so outrageous as Joe's lightning rods 'product' can become normalised. And there are plenty of real world examples of stuff that is unfair, unjust, unethical and yet the norm. The ending felt a little flat but to be honest how does one end a novel like this anyway? I found myself irate so many times as I read it at the antics of Joe and his ilk. I kept having to remind myself that a woman wrote this and she wrote it for a reason. The only downside is its hard to not be slightly embarrassed at recommending it to friends as it is a bit raunchy. I suspect a book like this will become 'cult' for all the wrong reasons.

Hilarious and never bleak (despite the fairly sinister topic). It's also very quotable. Very different from The Last Samurai, but I really enjoyed both!!!

Just ripped through this in a couple of hours without putting it down once!It's actually more thought-provoking than the blurb would suggest, I loved it!

Once you get the basic and rather juvenile conceit the rest of the book becomes rather boring and formulaic, despite the very positive FT recommendation.

Our Protagonist, Joe, has been a failure in life as a salesman at selling Encyclopedia Britannica and Electrolux vacuum cleaners. Then he realizes that to be a successful salesman he needs a product for which there is a natural unsatisfied need, which is how he comes up with his idea for his Lightning Rod employment agency. His agency will provide female employees, who will remain anonymous to both the people using her services and to all the other company employees. These employees not only provide the regular services associated with the job, but also sexual services to star male performers, so that they won't accost other regular female employees, which would instigate multimillion dollar sexual harassment suits. How Joe sells the idea to the job candidates and to the employers is the crux of the story. I have to say I admire the author's imagination in this area. One must engage in a minor suspension of disbelief for the ideas to ring true, but the overall story line is really cute and you want to root for all the characters, especially the former minimum wage office employees and professional escorts, who end up with dignified jobs plus about 60k/year and a chance to better themselves in real jobs. This is humorous fiction but also feel good fiction at the same time.Joe learns to deal with all sorts of problems as the government wanting to use his services to spy on its employees, the minority female with the highest score who Joe initially refuses to hire, since her anonymity would be compromised by the color of her skin, wherein all the other workers are white. It needs to be added here that all sexual alliances are made anonymously through a partition joining the men's and women's restrooms and only the rear end of the women is ever in view. The female author does a great job of explaining how this is possible. Joe also has to deal with a cut-rate competitor who offers a similar product but with lesser quality product [read intellectually and physically lacking in this regard]. The fun part is finding out how Joe manages to solve all these problems, while still not degrading his business by over-sampling his own product. The book isn't for deep intellectualization; it is merely for a fun read and it succeeds at that.

This book was really good fun to read. I love the language and the concept is just hilarious. However, this is in my opinion not nearly as good as her book "The Last Samurai" - but comparing the two is probably not fair as they are very different books.I will strongly recommend this, it is fresh and funny book, with a fun take on entrepreneurship.