2024 BOOK REVIEW # 19: LIGHTNING RODS BY HELEN DEWITT

Lighting Rods is one of the most absurd, demented, random books I have ever read. With clinical main characters without any emotive abilities, it delves deep into a surrealist method to tamp down on workplace harassment. It’s a take down of masochistic, corporate, scalable practices, salesforce platitudes, legalistic culture and office politics, wrapped into the infinite art of positive thinking.

Can’t remember how I came across this book but the Berlin-based American author DeWitt who grew up in Latin America comes across as delightfully devious.

“Books come along, and I open them in bookstores, and you see something sort of respectably done, it’s not like it’s badly done, but it makes me want to cut my throat,” she told an interviewer once, while publishing the book which came out in 2011 but was completed in 1999.

There are lines such as this one: "Most people don't know what they're doing half the time … What Renee realised was that the same thing applied to the country as a whole. It was set up from scratch by people who managed to overlook minor details like slavery and a whole sex."

It's combinations pretend Michel Houellebecq and Ayn Rand style. If ever you get attached to a character or feel there will finally be love in the air, it’s gone. What remains is an audacious treatise into gender differences and the forces of civilization which sometimes fail to bring them together.