Lightning Rods, Helen DeWitt
Satire is lost on some people and this is the sort of book you can't explain to your mother. That's what Helen DeWitt found when she tried to publish it. On her website you can see quotes from agents and other supposedly literary people telling her the book is reputation ending, alongside one from her mother who (as if you needed telling) hates the book. I guess some people are moral in a way that precludes the possibility of standards and humour co-existing. Or maybe they just don't care enough about their principles to joke about them. Life is too important to be taken seriously, as Oscar said.
Here's an example of just how beyond-words-to-explain-it good this book is. The section about Roy, the obese HR guy who wouldn't know a crime in progress if he was witness to one, starts out hilarious, goes through an intense patch of the horror-giggles as you realise that Helen DeWitt is taking a metaphysical scalpel to the psychology of congenitally unsuitable HR professionals everywhere, and ends with you feeling like you just went to a funeral for the better hopes of your generation because you have just read a chapter of literature's best satire since Swift about people you may as well actually work with for all the difference it would make.
As my father-in-law likes to say to me when I laugh at The Simpsons, 'I'm glad you still think this is a comedy. I'm old enough to realise it's a documentary.'
I say since Swift, only because Evelyn Waugh didn't count himself a satirist, but DeWitt is easily in that league of wonder, and mostly because she writes prose the way some people blow glass. I read the whole thing in a weekend and felt like I'd been in a hallucinatory version of my office, despite the fact that the plot is all about installing moveable panels in disabled toilets so that the bottom half of hookers can be wheeled in to act as lightning rods for the office deviants' needs. DeWitt is a famous linguist, numbering Latin, Ancient Greek, German, Arabic, Japanese and several other languages in her repertoire. She's also fluent in corporate bullshit. When the rest of us talk like this we hate ourselves and run to the biscuit tin. DeWitt made a bestseller out of it.
As Andrea Scrima said, 'On a sheer formal level, it’s already an achievement to craft page after page of free, indirect speech consisting solely of pre-formulated phrases; nowhere is it more apparent than in this sly, mordantly funny work that the mind can operate exclusively within the shallower depths of the collective subconscious—the ongoing chatter of shared homilies, aphorisms, advertising copy, bromides, and cliché.'
The way the plot unravels itself relies on the sort of convoluted sub-intelligent rationality that bores the better half of the nation into opening the desktop version of WhatApp if they haven't taken the psychological bait of the latest bit of corporate double speak. All good satire levels down key institutions. DeWitt does this by showing that, with the a water-finds-the-easiest-rout attitude and a teaspoon of ingenuity, a scheme like that can not only be made to work within the regulatory and cultural systems of our time, but actually enabled and enhanced by them.
While we watch America's regulatory state fail to respond in anything like an acceptable manner to the pandemic, this no longer seems so funny. Indeed, anyone paying attention to the world right now probably shouldn't read this book. Between our religious belief in the NHS at a time when we should probably reconsider the European agnosticism of a decentralised mixed model, the blithe acceptance of people pulling down statues in mobs and then gaslighting ordinary voters who seem uncomfortable with that, getting harmless academics fired for thinking in public, bullying people who speak up for the idea of biological sex in a feminist context, we might not be in a position to occupy DeWitt's high ground.
Of course, there are many other aspects of corporate life that DeWitt's point doesn't address. Women don't get an entirely equal run at their chances, but it's not exactly fair to imply that playing a part of a male fantasy in their only way to the top. Anyone thinking along those lines needs to take a re-read. Dewitt's theme as a author is not political but personal. Her lesson is brutal but timeless. You have to eat a little shit to do what you want to do. There are no easy paths to contentment, success, or achievement.
DeWitt is a philosopher, not an activist. God knows how she has managed to stay so popular in the current climate. I'm not whether this book is a metaphorical satire against markets in general, as well as prostitution specifically. It is certainly a satire of the way we make intellectual life difficult for people. And DeWitt's experience of the publishing world is enough to turn any of us socialist. But she's too intelligent to be making a point that boring or unsophisticated. She's too pro-tech, pro-progress to be saying that. It's easy enough to read that in, of course, but the satire is about us and the systems we create and justify.
Some of the best satire is about the women who make it to the top, after working as lightning rods. They are asked the secret to their success and obviously can't tell people how they saved up to go to Harvard Law School, or all the important life lessons they learned doing the work, so they pick something spurious but inspiring-sounding from their past and tell people that. One of them talks about learning shorthand and practising it throughout her career, so that when she got to Harvard she was able to make the best of her time there.
That's spot on. Successful people are full of bullshit about what made them successful (unless they really are exceptional, like many self-made people). DeWitt's satire is not so narrow or political that it can't be about everyone, at some level. Be careful about reading this book. You might not come out of it thinking any better of yourself. And every time you laugh, you'll know that your mother would be terribly disappointed.
Most enjoyably of all though, this book is a great big, highly intelligent, cry-till-it-hurts, fuck off to all sorts of spurious nonsense that lives a fine life out in the world. Long may it prosper.