Lightning Rods Dewitt tmn (2012 last March)

got Lightning Rods by Helen Dewitt from Ponce library... revisited this commentary (sure is better than any I found so far elsewhere by googling: not much discussion. not really getting into it. got to talk about tv for that innit!)  
these notes from TextEdit what the heck did not bring over formatting, darn. hypertext, italics for me, some bold, bit o color for bit re satire Jon Stewart, parody Colbert and for Jim McC funny re I don't feel rage towards it (see you tomorrow, 1Q84)  and now not caring to do  ohswells oh okay doing at least partially    need my italics . . . .huh re formatting is it bcs TextEdit uses,eg, 'strong' rather than 'b' for bold ~ used to be, I think, that blogger recognized both these whatevers html styles? but have they taken a stand  for  web design uniformity is it? 


Opening Round   March 9  March 9 Mark Binelli Lightning Rods v. Salvage the Bones

Kevin Guilfoile: I have to admit to being increasingly fascinated with the very idea of Lightning Rods’ existence since the day I started reading it. As Judge Binelli describes it, the entire novel is basically a reductio ad absurdum satire about the acceptance of, and even promotion of, ridiculously bad behavior. But what’s remarkable about Lightning Rods is that it isn’t anything other than that. This must have taken a superhuman level of concentration and discipline to write. The temptation to include something like a narrative arc. And characters. And at least one other idea. Why, it must have been enormous. .. I know it sounds like I’m making fun of it, but I actually say all this with sincere admiration. Granted, if it hadn’t made me laugh I’d have thought the whole enterprise a colossal waste of time, but that only adds to the high-wire act.  but now I think she wasn't doing it on purpose!
And there are moments when she flat out teases the reader over this. This next part might be a little bit spoilery, but there is a section in the middle in which a new character is introduced. yes yes Roy who eats m&ms, thank you, been looking to find someone reacting to this.  He is developed in far greater detail than any other person in the book, even the protagonist. It is not only hinted at, but explicitly stated in a bit of naked foreshadowing that he is going to have a major role in the development of the book’s plot. right - chp ends re the far-reaching repercussions that lightning rod facility seen by someone who shouldn't have seen it.   And he is mentioned again only one other time. Barely in passing. well basically y that is the effect but okay the repercussions were that after eventually being let-go several mergers down the road, Roy talks about this to someone, who is his brother in law & who is in the FBI and that is who then comes to Joe -- but ends up wanting to use the lightning rods in govt.  so it turns out to further joe's success, whereas that chapter ending sounded a note of coming doom to the enterprise.  happens at other pnts I think, too, like the very opening sentence of the book ~ "one way looking at it whole thing an unfortunate side effect of Hurrican Edna"  ~  'unfortunate'     I don't know, I think she Dewitt may have at that time thought it was going to be unfortunate and then by end of the book was not writing it that way but did not change it (and refuses editing, see below...) so now I am irked by the sloppiness.  irked I do not trust her.  also per comments here Hurricane Edna and being an Encyclopedia salesman seem like from decades earlier than she set the novel, and now I think that's just that she had one idea at the start and then went differently. sloppy.
You don’t even realize a joke is being played on you until like two days later when you get to the last page.  well I did right away because it then took up without Roy and I wanted to know if really going to play out so at az searched for Roy.  also for Ed Wilson & Elaine story which also does not go anywhere but ok that works as a vignette, there's no contraindicating explicit foreshadowing. Right at the point where you might be getting frustrated that this is basically a work of fiction with no conflict yes, DeWitt sets up a point of explicit tension. yep. She even says it’s going to happen. And so you start to anticipate it. You read faster.  The book is heading downhill toward confrontation and denouement.      And none of that ever happens.     I know!      I’m not sure how many people are going to be as amused by a book-length punk like that. But I can only say, brava.    if it were on purpose.  could it have been   I don't guess I think so, now, after reading posts on her blog...  

-sophronisba: Lightning Rods made me laugh out loud a few times. I admire DeWitt's uncompromising willingness to go all the way with her premise, and I really thought she nailed the voice.  except if it's not that she nailed it  (in mockery, parody) but that she speaks it -- and so knowing that, can we not enjoy it the same? no we cannot, why, there is some connection lost (reader to book/author, I guess) and without that not.  But what bugs me about the book is that to get the humor you really have to accept a lot of male/female stereotypes; if you can't embrace those stereotypes, then the book will not work. I laughed, yes, but the book ended up having an odd retro feeling for me that I don't think the author intended.
-Neighbors73: I agree, I get that it was a satire, but the gender stereotypes .. Am I really to believe in 2000's America, all the "top performers" in a company are men, and all the women are secretaries?
-ondaatje: I wanted to like the DeWitt but I got thrown off balance by technicalities early on. Specifically, I thought the hurricane she refers to in the beginning (Edna) happened (as it did in the real world) in 1954. And the traveling Britannica/Electrolux salesman, not to mention the role of women in the workplace, felt in line with that era. So it was a shock, and very confusing, to realize that she was talking about the present day. I think this never allowed me to buy in to deadpan of her satire. Add to that the lack sympathetic characters and the plot teases that never paid off, and I was frustrated and glad when it was over.

-sophronisba: I actually really loved the first two-thirds or so of The Last Samurai, but it fell apart at the end. That seems to be a theme with DeWitt.



Quarterfinals  March 20 Roxy Reno The Sense of an Ending v. Lightning Rods
 
Kevin: Wow. That Observer article is fascinating.
In the abstract, Helen DeWitt’s uncompromising approach to her art is admirable, but in reality a lack of self-doubt is a poor measure of genius. Most of the writers who hold such an attitude are delusional. The fact that DeWitt has managed to produce two excellent books by treating her editors as adversaries is testimony to her peculiar talent, but it makes for a terrible example.   ..  I’m skeptical that DeWitt is a genius driven mad by her inferiors in the publishing business. right.  She appears to be a brilliant but troubled woman who became increasingly frustrated when the people she was working with—people who, trust me, feel very passionately about bringing great commercial art to the marketplace—wouldn’t willingly become her enablers.   ..   I knew that Lightning Rods was something of a response to her experience in publishing, but I had no idea it was such a multi-layered response. yeah ~  like, geez, she meant it ?  (though: meant what, exactly?)  You could, in fact, read it as a manifesto on the primacy of the artist—The Fountainhead for the 21st century, only with the hero building glory holes instead of gas stations and without the graphic celebration of rape.  One wonders if a morally reprehensible political philosophy will one day be built from it.

-JimMcC: I like gonzo books that are out silly and angry and funny and unexpected. Lightning Rods just felt like lazy satire to me. A fun premise dropped into a world that never gels, clumsily written, and executed more with a grudge than with any real appreciation of the subject. The novel itself feels like a relic. If it were written in the 70s, I think I would have appreciated the muscular attack on workplace sexuality. But other people got here first, wrote about it better, and actually seemed to demonstrate an understanding of human beings. Root your satire in SOMEthing.        The thing is, I found myself decently amused with the book as I read it but have become increasingly dissatisfied with it. yes.  I don't feel rage towards it (see you tomorrow, 1Q84), but it has become something of an irritant. Though if this ends up head to head with Murakami in the next round, you best believe I'll suddenly be on its side.  :)


Semifinals  March 26 Michelle Orange Lightning Rods v. 1Q84
.. both Helen DeWitt and Haruki Murakami boil the novel down to one of its basic precepts: Here’s my brain: nifty, right?  ..
Lighting Rods captivates from the start. The first 50 pages, especially, evoke the death-spin insularity of the voices in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. DeWitt has the knack for making formal daring feel utterly familiar. She commits fully, thrillingly, to the idiom of pragmatic self-interest as the stuff of her characters’ inner lives. Joe and the others cogitate and address themselves with the fathomless logic and received life-management platitudes that you imagine must be hiding something terrifying when you encounter people who actually talk that way.

and I was so into it but then I read around Observer profile and her response on her blog and my impression is Oh SHE ACTUALLY TALKS THAT WAY.
and now I don't much care to finish it? why?  I thought reading it I was with a mind in a similar relationship to the voice as me   ?

paperpools: Rashomon  paperpools.blogspot.com/2011/12/rashomon.html     [Michael Miller has published a profile in the New York Observer, here.]
paperpools: chrono    paperpools.blogspot.com/2011/12/chrono.html
 
But the fact is, there might be a solution I did not see; if so, it would involve a lot of dreary striving, but there are people who would be spared grief.  The person to ask was someone with relevant information.   Bill  {former agent}  must presumably know what I should have done differently; he might know what I could do now; the person to ask was the person with the answer to the question. So I wrote to Bill (part of this e-mail is quoted in the piece) and went on packing.  I did not say where I was going, because if I had said I was going to Eastbourne, to Beachy Head with its 600-foot cliff, it would be very easy for him to stop this. He could simply call the police in Eastbourne, explain the situation, forward the e-mail, tell me he had done so; if I went, I would be picked up by the police.
I got a reply from Bill in 40 minutes which I could not bring myself to look at. Just before it was time to go, I read his e-mail - and it must be said there was a great deal of sympathy and feeling in his reply. (I sent this to Michael Miller, though I could naturally not grant permission to print it, because I wanted to be fair; many people, I think, would warm to this. See Bill in a more favorable light than the person packing to catch a plane.) It did not answer the question. It was an emotional response to a factual question - which is precisely what one always does get from the biz.  So I walked out the door with my carry-on bag and took the U-Bahn to Rudow and the bus to Schoenefeld and got on the plane.
It is very tiring to expose yourself to more of the same misunderstandings, but I realised, as I flew to Gatwick, that this is a bad thing to do to someone: contact him before leaving to commit suicide, in the hope of a helpful solution, and then jump off a cliff because he said the wrong thing.  How can you do that to someone? If you're going to jump off the cliff, it turns out, it would have been much better to jump without writing, Bill is very emotional, perhaps not the kind of person to respond rationally at a time of crisis.
The fair thing to do was explain once more that I simply wanted to know whether there was something I could do; if there was something I hadn't tried, I would do it. And then give him time to think things over, because perhaps he would not immediately know what to say. So I checked into a hotel and wrote explaining again, pointing out that I thought I was doing what people had wanted DFW to do. I got a reply which still did not answer the question, he said that suicide was the most selfish thing you could do and Wallace's family had had to live with terrible grief and so on.  There was a certain irony to this, because the reason things had gone wrong was that I had unselfishly spent 3 months looking after my mother instead of pulling together another MS for Bill to sell.
...I think at this point I wrote to Bill suggesting it might be better if he talked to David. His assistant wrote saying that Bill had gone on vacation to Mexico for 2 weeks and was uncontactable. I wrote explaining to Shaun that I was a 12-minute bus ride from a 600-foot cliff and did not think I would wait 2 weeks for Bill's return on the off-chance that something useful might come of it. It seemed as though it would look bad for Bill if a suicide took place in his absence, so perhaps it might be better to consult one of the other agents.

comments seminfinals
-jamesharrigan: An interesting comment that Judge Orange made was that Lightning Rods hits "...a sweet spot between satire and parody". I confess that I don't understand the distinction, can someone enlighten me?
-Neighbors73:  I would say that parody has an element of mimicry to it. That a parody will imitate what it makes fun of (think Stephen Colbert) versus just making fun of it (think Jon Stewart).
I'd consider the corporate double speak in Lightning Rods to be an example of parody.  But DOES SHE ? (Dewitt)    ~ she does think she is being funny, I think, and mocking the subject matter ?  but the seemingly-parodied voice in which Joe thinks, as also it turns out does every character whose thoughts we encounter, is that HER OWN VOICE?
-JohnWarner: That's the exact comparison I make. Colbert is parody, Stewart is satire.