This is a technically perfect book. It’s as if Swift took “A Modest Proposal” and instead of just proposing eating staving Irish babies, he wrote a novel about a guy who actually starts a company doing it. What’s even more terrifying about this book is that the Modest Proposal here is clearly a satirical thing but at the same time you can see someone going through the logic of actually thinking it to be a good idea. Whereas Swift’s main goal for his Proposal is to shock, here DeWitt indicts the culture that could make her Proposal seem so plausible, if not in the actual content but in the spirit.
I’m reminded of one of Liz Bruenig’s columns where she argues that capitalism is a Dark Satanic Mill that grinds everything into its logic of monetary exchange. DeWitt apes the vacuous, mind-numbing American optimism in business to make that point here. And the best/worst thing is that it’s not like Lightning Rods solves the putative problem it was invented for: women still complained about feeling degraded and disrespected on the job. The difference is that they were paid for it, and thus we have nothing else to say about it, no moral language to indict the action, since it’s exchange between consenting adults, no? If you agreed to a job and its attendant responsibilities, you have no room to complain.
On the other hand: Lightning Rods had a positive impact for those who availed of its services and those it employed. Renee and Lucille got through school debt-free from their extra earnings, and what they learned on the job (whipping a bare butt taught Lucille to have a killer instinct!) helped them in the future. DeWitt copies the same aspirational language that people use to discuss their careers and uses it here to talk about doing something fucked up, to show that that aspirational language is in fact veneer to hide the dark, amoral heart of careerism: the Dark Satanic Mill grinds your deepest longings and dreams and spits out something beautiful, positive, and ultimately hollow and disgusting. The Dark Satanic Mill runs and runs, creates solutions to problems it itself has created (e.g. offering lightning rod-free temps!), and gives a narrative trajectory of ostensible success and achievement to one’s life. It is a false religion, a golden calf. And yet we cannot turn away from the god we worship.
You can read this book as a feminist book, how the world kowtows to male desire to the effacement of everything else, but really I think this is more of a Marxist book, one that takes the logic of commodification to its conclusion, to show that the myriad ways we’ve complacently accepted that logic in our lives has a darkness at its core that we ultimately cannot accept, even if we pay no mind to it in small doses everyday. There are some things to which we place infinite value, that is not fungible, that is not amenable to exchange. This book is a reminder of that fact.