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#5 Platform: Lightning Rods
Jul. 25th, 2012 01:15 amSome ideas do get way farther than you expect them to, but...
Book #26: Lightning Rods
Author: Helen Dewitt
Provenance: Bought (with gift card) from Indigo in Eaton Centre, Toronto
Now, for today's question: how much credit do you give a book for being written by an author who you really like? I feel that my reaction to Lightning Rods, Helen Dewitt's long-awaited follow-up of sorts to the classic (to me) The Last Samurai, comes from that. I didn't think that it was as good as that book, certainly, but I ultimately found it a fairly enjoyable, wry satire. That said... I probably wouldn't have given it that chance if I hadn't had so much trust in her from the last thing of hers I'd read.
So here's the story here. Joe was a vacuum cleaner salesman who regularly embarked on fairly involved masturbatory fantasies regarding a woman's lower body coming through a wall, while on the other side, they could be doing something unrelated, not really being perturbed – reading a magazine, appearing on a game show, getting work done, whatever. He's rather a weird guy, but he's nothing if not single-minded... and he works out a way to start getting these installed as business tools. You know, to defuse sexual tension in the office and avoid highly damaging sexual harassment lawsuits.
Here's what I liked about the book. It really feels like Dewitt thought through a fairly ridiculous premise, and worked out how it might actually function. How would recruitment work? Anonymization? Pitching to companies? Equal opportunities? She then pushed the idea straight on to its logical endpoint, in a fairly nice satirical fashion. The repeated business phrases (one of the first things you learn as a salesman is how to turn a good business phrase), the call forwards to the success of the project, the little dumb-but-clever ideas Joe has for fixing things, the flatness of the prose, all contribute to the humorous sense that this might actually be able to happen, if someone pushed the system in the right way at the right time.
That said... the book does rather feel behind the time, in this regard. Although the story itself is careful to avoid giving a specific time in which it's happening, I've heard that Dewitt basically wrote this in the mid-to-late '90s, and it does feel like it might have been more of the moment back then. I don't know that sexual harassment is the hot topic it was back then. And the prose is rather flat and repetitive; even when you know it's on purpose, it can be hard to take. There's also not much in the way of interesting characters or development, but then, that's often the case in satires, anyway.
I guess what it comes down to is that I did enjoy the book all right, but I think if it had been written by an author I didn't know, I wouldn't have been inclined to stick with it as long or to look at it quite as closely. I wonder if someone in a more business-y setting than my work would have found it more wryly amusing from the get-go, but still, the humor's there if you wait for it. I kinda hope for something different next time out, though. But I'll take the Dewitt I can get.
Next up: The Fault in Our Stars. For real this time.
Book #26: Lightning Rods
Author: Helen Dewitt
Provenance: Bought (with gift card) from Indigo in Eaton Centre, Toronto
Now, for today's question: how much credit do you give a book for being written by an author who you really like? I feel that my reaction to Lightning Rods, Helen Dewitt's long-awaited follow-up of sorts to the classic (to me) The Last Samurai, comes from that. I didn't think that it was as good as that book, certainly, but I ultimately found it a fairly enjoyable, wry satire. That said... I probably wouldn't have given it that chance if I hadn't had so much trust in her from the last thing of hers I'd read.
So here's the story here. Joe was a vacuum cleaner salesman who regularly embarked on fairly involved masturbatory fantasies regarding a woman's lower body coming through a wall, while on the other side, they could be doing something unrelated, not really being perturbed – reading a magazine, appearing on a game show, getting work done, whatever. He's rather a weird guy, but he's nothing if not single-minded... and he works out a way to start getting these installed as business tools. You know, to defuse sexual tension in the office and avoid highly damaging sexual harassment lawsuits.
Here's what I liked about the book. It really feels like Dewitt thought through a fairly ridiculous premise, and worked out how it might actually function. How would recruitment work? Anonymization? Pitching to companies? Equal opportunities? She then pushed the idea straight on to its logical endpoint, in a fairly nice satirical fashion. The repeated business phrases (one of the first things you learn as a salesman is how to turn a good business phrase), the call forwards to the success of the project, the little dumb-but-clever ideas Joe has for fixing things, the flatness of the prose, all contribute to the humorous sense that this might actually be able to happen, if someone pushed the system in the right way at the right time.
That said... the book does rather feel behind the time, in this regard. Although the story itself is careful to avoid giving a specific time in which it's happening, I've heard that Dewitt basically wrote this in the mid-to-late '90s, and it does feel like it might have been more of the moment back then. I don't know that sexual harassment is the hot topic it was back then. And the prose is rather flat and repetitive; even when you know it's on purpose, it can be hard to take. There's also not much in the way of interesting characters or development, but then, that's often the case in satires, anyway.
I guess what it comes down to is that I did enjoy the book all right, but I think if it had been written by an author I didn't know, I wouldn't have been inclined to stick with it as long or to look at it quite as closely. I wonder if someone in a more business-y setting than my work would have found it more wryly amusing from the get-go, but still, the humor's there if you wait for it. I kinda hope for something different next time out, though. But I'll take the Dewitt I can get.
Next up: The Fault in Our Stars. For real this time.
