Lightning Rods

Let's be clear: this book is not for everybody, perhaps not even for many of the readers who loved DeWitt's fantastic debut novel, The Last Samurai (which, inexplicably, has gone out of print). That book was a brilliant, multi-voiced, and big-hearted encyclopedia of a novel; this one is more like The Producers (or South Park) than Kurosawa. A tale of a tireless salesman who hits paydirt with a bizarre remedy for workplace sexual harassment, Lightning Rods is a jaw-droppingly smutty send-up of corporate self-help culture that, as the best satires do, never drops its earnestly chipper mask and pushes its preposterous premise even farther than you can imagine it can go.