Lightning Rods [is] a grim commentary on how America’s vast intellectual capital is largely misspent enabling and correcting corporate excesses, and suggests a warning to would-be corporate caricaturists: with the headlines growing ever more absurd in a post-Enron, post-TARP era, satirists need a very long blade to outdo corporate America’s ability to inflict indignity upon itself. DeWitt has given us a worthy satire of this logic and an interesting exploration of gender, but one feels that she did not go quite far enough.

DeWitt, whose interest in languages was apparent in “The Last Samurai,” has adopted here the idiom of America’s pragmatic temper, and the story of Joe and his business plan shows how a fetish for common sense can make for silly, sleazy extremes. The basic premise for “Lightning Rods” is so audacious that it might be hard to get past its general conceit, but its true brilliance lies in DeWitt’s careful deployment of language so common that we no longer see it. As any million-dollar litigation lawyer or two-cent literary critic will tell you, the devil is in the details.

Lightning Rods is no more “about” sexual tension in the workplace than A Tale of a Tub is about the tub. But if Joe’s “Lightning Rods” are the vehicle, what is the tenor? What, exactly, is being skewered? By the end of the book, the answer, wonderfully, seems to be “everything”: bureaucracy, sexual politics, the objectification of the female body, the sanctification of same, political correctness, political incorrectness, etiquette, boorishness, ambition, laziness, late capitalism, and even logic itself....

It is, by design, a minor work.... But it so emphatically aces the tasks it sets for itself, and delivers such a jolt of pleasure along the way, that it reminds me of just how major a minor work can be. I wish the other leading American novelists would produce more books in this vein.