With Sam Waterman and Ellora Sutton
Content Information: Sexual content
Joe, a failing salesman, is masturbating to his favourite fantasy – a gameshow in which panelists must guess which female contestant is secretly having sex while calmly responding to a set of questions – when he comes up with an innovative solution to sexual harassment in the workplace. He develops, sells and installs the Lightening Rods provision in an increasing number of American offices, finally finding the success he craved, partly fuelled by a lucrative partnership with the FBI. Lightening rods are the women he hires to anonymously provide sexual relief to employees. Joe spends the novel explaining the evolution and effects of this experimental response to workplace harassment, the key to which lies in his assertion that you must take life and people as they are, rather than what you want them to be. The book is a satire on sales, the workplace, and sex. Despite remaining unpublished for over a decade, New Directions released it in 2011 and it was shortlisted for the 2013 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction.
