Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods
& the hegemonic shallowness of America
“The way I see it.” The characters in Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods constantly qualify their statements with such markers of apparent humility, both in their speech and their inner monologues. (Indeed, there is very little difference between their speech and their thoughts: these are not people with much inner depth.) While the openness to alternative perspectives this phrase signals is (sometimes) sincere, it is also unbearably shallow. You may see it different, well, we’re all entitled to our opinions.
American culture of the turn of the millennium, when the novel was written and set, was hegemonically shallow. We had reached the end of history: communism had fallen, the Timberlands logo was stamped on the face of the future. All important domestic political questions had been settled, save some niggling over details. We had decided that women could participate in the market in more or less the same way men could, same for blacks, though they might encounter some griping about “affirmative action” or “PC culture.” Sure, there was still team Red versus team Blue, Darwin Fish X Bible Belt, the small matter of the GLBT community, but you could get on with your life in various K-Mart parking lots. Mostly, you didn’t have to think.
Mostly not thinking is the default state of all characters in this novel, above all of its protagonist Joe, who at several points describes himself as an “ideas guy.” The novel takes its title after his big idea. The sexual revolution had opened the office doors for women, but it had not addressed the “problem of sexual harassment.” In this context, the problem is conceived in purely economic terms: sexual misconduct in the workspace represented a liability to the company. Joe proposes a simple solution: make entirely anonymous sexual encounters available to “high performing” (essentially identical with “high testosterone”) men by employing “lightning rods,” women employees who would double as sexual objects.
The story is structured as a “how they made it big,” the same sort of hagiographic story that has been told about McDonalds, Berkshire Hathaway, Coca-Cola, tracing an enterprise from a twinkle in a founder’s eye, to early successes and stumbles, to eventual, inevitable success. Inevitable, because at the core of a successful business is a good idea, something that “sells itself.” Or at least, this is the self-understanding of the business community that ripples outward to become the understanding of culture as a whole. In reality, these ideas are queer constructs of pure id repackaged in a set of bromides: Joe’s sentences are over half cliche by volume.
The most persistent cliches concern empathy and understanding. “A good sales person accepts people as they are, not as they would like to be.” In reality, Joe has a shallow and lazy understanding of other people. Two major examples of this cross and structure the novel. While Joe may be an ideas guy, he is certainly not a details guy: he thinks through the lightning rod concept at a basic, mechanical level (how will the guy get to fuck the woman in a way that preserves anonymity for all parties), he does not get “in the weeds” to consider such small details as the legality of the scheme or the social consequences for participants.
The reader, or at least this reader, takes a fundamentally contradictory set of interests in the narrative. On the one hand, we want off this crazy ride—the scheme is disgusting, degrading, in any just world—and on the other hand we want to stay on, to see how far this crazy ride will go. While the story does throw up forces that might put a stop to things (the human resources department, the law, competition), it spoils itself early on that Lightning Rods will be a massive success. Joe succeeds, in the end, not because he is a good businessman staking his future on a good business concept, but because he is gross and shallow in basically the same way his world is gross and shallow, which is only a slight (if really any) exaggeration on how our world is gross and shallow.
Well, that and he has help to cover for his gaps. Two early employees, Lucille and Renée, share Joe’s flippancy towards the morality of the scheme: it’s just a job, not a pleasant one, but one that is “compensated fairly.” An ambitious woman can parlay that remuneration into bigger prospects, finance her way into Harvard Law. These women push Joe to do better. By which, of course, we don’t mean morally better, but commercially better. These are the most sympathetic caricatures on offer, the novel seems in some way to genuinely admire their ambition, their unflappability. But they do not escape the overwhelming shallowness of the setting. Indeed, it is depressing that human intelligence and feeling, such as it exists here, is aimed towards extending and nurturing the realm of shallowness.
The central metaphor of Lightning Rods equates sex and defecation. In the main instance of the scheme, the transaction takes place inside, or rather across, the disabled stall: a secret door opens between the men’s and the woman’s disabled stalls, the woman inserts her rear through the slot, the man proceeds. This metaphor denigrates and trivializes sex. It also, oddly, elevates shitting.
The second of Joe’s central misunderstandings comes from a trivial encounter. On a bus, an obese man addresses a rude question towards a little person. The latter brushes off any potential offense and responds politely, leading to a brief, friendly interaction. Hegemonic shallowness is not a complete inability to learn or to change one’s mind: but when the mind does change, it does so slowly, superficially. Since Joe already has toilets on the brain (he doesn’t like the ambiance of the disabled stall) he has the powerful insight that, hey, little people and just short guys need to use the potty too: wouldn’t they appreciate one closer to the floor? (Years later he has the even more powerful insight: hey, that fat guy shits. Wouldn’t he like a bigger toilet?)
The kayfabe of Lightning Rods, it’s Gogolian commitment to holding itself to the painfully limited understandings of its characters, holds until a slight wobble at the end. Joe has triumphed almost completely. He has expanded his operations to all 50 states, sorted out all legal troubles, is unfazed by his competition. Yet he doesn’t feel triumphant. Reflecting on his life, he never set out to sell weird, clinical office sex. He started out selling the Encyclopedia Britannica. And if the world were only slightly less shallow, if just a few more people were interested in purchasing the Encyclopedia Brittanica, he might have happily kept on doing that. Alas, the market wants genital stimulation more than it wants to know the capital of Peru.
The insight doesn’t last, doesn’t lead to any sort of freedom. Shallowness has a viral quality: it infects and consumes everything about the world that is strange or beautiful or worrisome and tells you, huh, the way I see it is, you don’t really have to think. American culture of the turn of the millennium was a kind of collective manic depression. Things can’t possibly get any better. Which means, things can only get worse. Which means, hold on for dear life.
Today, our culture is six different schizo-affective disorders. Which can make one nostalgic in a way for trusty old shallowness. The Internet makes a brief cameo in those closing pages, as Joe remarks that Encyclopedia Brittanica will always have its niche, as one really can’t trust Wikipedia to get the details right. (Yes, Wikimedia Foundation, fine. I will fork over $3.25.) I thought of OpenAI’s recent announcement that, having cracked the “mental health problems” associated with ChatGPT, they were opening up the shutters for erotic roleplay. Perhaps Lightning Rods will have a second life as a set of fetish prompts line itemed under an enterprise license. Perhaps feminist separatism will be achieved by means of AI boyfriends.