If the recent Walter Isaacson biography of the late Steve Jobs has a companion volume in the world of fiction, Helen DeWitt’s new novel Lightning Rods may be it. ,em>Lightning Rods is, ultimately, an account of business genius: specifically, of the bold, inventive product-vision that so transformed American culture in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The key events of the novel take place at the turn of the millennium, but the novel is narrated from the present by a nameless observer. As the narrator tracks a remarkable sequence of epiphanies experienced by protagonist “Joe,” we learn the history of human resources firm Lightning Rods, Inc., which markets and places “bifunctional” female staff willing to perform regular secretarial and administrative duties as well as earn substantial additional income by participating in a kind of anonymous, computer-facilitated sexual roulette in their workplaces. The system works like this: a few times a day, a female “lightning rod” will be paired anonymously with one of the male staff members by a message that appears on the computer screens of both parties. If the male employee elects to pursue the lightning rod’s services, which is entirely voluntary, both participants separately make their way to specially modified disabled stalls in the men’s and women’s bathrooms. The back half of the female participant then passes backward through a hole in the wall between the gendered bathrooms on a “transporter,” and the male staff member, equipped in the stall with condoms and lubricant, can enjoy a few moments of no-strings-attached ventro-dorsal intercourse on the company dime in the name of collective productivity. Designed to help corporations avoid disruptive sexual harassment lawsuits, Lightning Rods, Inc. is wildly successful. READ MORE
 Lightning Rods A Novel by Helen DeWitt New Directions, 2011 275pages Reviewed by Kevin C. Moore |
