Yes, But Why?
I have just readLightning Rods, quite quickly and with my thoughts about it veering one way and another.
The lightning Rods of the title are women employed by large companies to be anonymous female providers of relief for the pent-up sexual urges of the companies' male staff. The result is supposed to be (and is) a drop in the sexual harassment that would inevitably sully the work place without them. Male satisfaction would increase productivity and female workers, less harassed, would need fewer days off sick.
The idea has been dreamed up by Joe, a failed door to door salesman, whose hopeless sexual fantasies alone in his trailer-park home are the spark for the idea that is to make him a millionaire.
The first couple of chapters had me hooked because we were convincingly inside poor failing Joe's head. But then he gets his astonishingly brilliant idea (he is to get more of them as the book progresses) and I began to wonder if this was going to be boring. It became so. Then it picked up, Then it got boring again. Finally it....stopped, because the author seemed to have run out of brilliant ideas for Joe to stumble on.
I bought the book because it was published in my country by a small UK house called And Other Stories. I wanted to support the publisher. I will support them again, but only once.
The book's cover tells me it's a satire on corporate America. But if it is it would have been much more effective at half the length - 297 pages in the edition I read. Maybe American readers, in the more puritanical USA, are expected to be more jolted by the subject matter and its admittedly deft handling than we would be on this side of the pond. Ultimately, though, the inventiveness of Helen Dewitt's characters' thought processes depend on a single riff. And you can only riff so long.
The lightning Rods of the title are women employed by large companies to be anonymous female providers of relief for the pent-up sexual urges of the companies' male staff. The result is supposed to be (and is) a drop in the sexual harassment that would inevitably sully the work place without them. Male satisfaction would increase productivity and female workers, less harassed, would need fewer days off sick.
The idea has been dreamed up by Joe, a failed door to door salesman, whose hopeless sexual fantasies alone in his trailer-park home are the spark for the idea that is to make him a millionaire.
The first couple of chapters had me hooked because we were convincingly inside poor failing Joe's head. But then he gets his astonishingly brilliant idea (he is to get more of them as the book progresses) and I began to wonder if this was going to be boring. It became so. Then it picked up, Then it got boring again. Finally it....stopped, because the author seemed to have run out of brilliant ideas for Joe to stumble on.
I bought the book because it was published in my country by a small UK house called And Other Stories. I wanted to support the publisher. I will support them again, but only once.
The book's cover tells me it's a satire on corporate America. But if it is it would have been much more effective at half the length - 297 pages in the edition I read. Maybe American readers, in the more puritanical USA, are expected to be more jolted by the subject matter and its admittedly deft handling than we would be on this side of the pond. Ultimately, though, the inventiveness of Helen Dewitt's characters' thought processes depend on a single riff. And you can only riff so long.
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