Lightning Rods, by Helen DeWitt
Helen DeWitt's first novel was the literary fiction masterpiece The Last Samurai. The premise of her second novel, Lightning Rods:
Joe, a salesman, is obsessed with the idea of seeing the top half of a woman, fully clothed, sticking through a window or hole in a wall, while someone has sex with her lower half on the other side and she pretends nothing is happening. This inspires him to invent a clever way to reduce sexual harassment in the workplace: a contraption between bathroom stalls where anonymous female employees, termed lightning rods, present their lower halves for high-risk male employees to use as a safe outlet for their urges, thus preventing the HR costs from them venting those urges elsewhere.
My sister's reaction when I described this to her: "Yeah, I think I've seen that Literotica story."
There's a book by Jackie Ess I really like, called Darryl. It's about a guy, Darryl, who's into being cuckolded. He has some pretty involved misadventures, narrated in a ridiculous, charming voice.
Lightning Rods is definitely a Darryl. One of the telltale signs is that while reading these books, you feel compelled to read bits out loud to whoever's around, in a Get A Load of This Guy tone.
It's possible to write a book that's a Darryl but without a goofy sex focus: this gives you something like Notes from Underground or The True Story of Ah Q. (And with comparisons like that last one, it makes sense that Lightning Rods is concerned with describing the essence of a nation.) Sex comedy is the purest form for it, though.
Lightning Rods is executed extremely thoughtfully, on a number of levels. The book goes into the various practical issues with Joe's plan in detail. Not 100% comprehensively — if you tried this in real life, of course you'd encounter more logistical issues than what's covered — but an impressive amount does get addressed. We get perspectives from lightning rods, men making use of them, other people in the company, all carefully fleshed out. You really start to care about Joe's vision.
It's an outlier compared to DeWitt's other works, but not by as much as you might think: She does write a lot of Weird Guys (often women), and even a lot of characters with odd detached attitudes toward sex. Sibylla from The Last Samurai would be able to support a Darryl-style plot, if the focus hadn't been elsewhere.
The real thing setting Lightning Rods apart is the prose style. It's full of cliche-heavy folksy business speak: "As any salesman knows, you think you've covered all the angles and all of a sudden when you least expect it out of left field comes a boomerang." This is the real target (well, one of the targets) of the satire, and it's why the book needs the classic porn setting of generic offices where what the business actually does isn't worth specifying.
Fun read, more thoughtful than you'd expect, avoid if you don't like reading about sex.
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