It's easy enough to enjoy a novel whose characters you love. While you read you can find yourself rooting for them, and after you finish the novel you might wish there was a sequel so that you could meet them again. The novel makes its own world, and you happily inhabit that world for a few days or a few weeks. You learn from it, and, one hopes, learn about yourself and your world in the process.

Here's an honest question, though: what do you do with a novel whose characters you can't stand? As I read Helen DeWitts latest novel Lightning Rods, I found myself actively rooting against the main character. Joe, a failed salesman of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and of vacuum cleaners, realizes that he needs to sell something he can believe in. And he decides what he can really believe in is selling anonymous sexual encounters in corporate America.

In order to do this, he devises a plan where he employs "lightning rods." The "lightning rods" are female employees who do secretarial work on a temporary basis for the company that hires them. As part of their job, they have anonymous sex with male employees in corporate restrooms. (I won't get into detail. This is a PG-13 blog.) Joe goes to great lengths to make sure that the workers and the lightning rods don't know each other. As you might expect, everything does not go according to plan. Human resources, threats of a EEOC lawsuit, and workers who don't appreciate the extent of their jobs are some of the problems Joe faces.

Clearly, Lightning Rods is a work of satire. And there are many moments that are laugh out loud funny. DeWitt's punchy prose moves the narrative along quickly, and her ear for dialogue creates characters you can actually imagine. (Given the situation, this is no small feat.) We learn that two of the lightning rods -- Lucille and Rene -- go on to interesting careers after they are lightning rods. In offices with lightning rods, worker productivity is up and absenteeism and sexual harassment is down.

Ultimately, though, the characters in Lightning Rods are heartless. There is no compassion in the novel, no interpersonal interaction that we could rightly call human. I suppose this is where the satire comes in. But I was glad the novel wasn't any longer. There's only so much heartlessness I can take.

Reading the book, I couldn't help but compare Lightning Rods to DeWitt's debut novel of 2001 The Last Samurai, which is one of the most tender and heartfelt novels I've ever read. The Last Samurai is the story of Sibylla, who decides to leave her doctoral program in classics at Oxford. After a one-night stand, she becomes pregnant and takes a job in data entry while raising her son, Ludo. She rides the London Tube with the boy and teaches him languages while they ride. By the time hes three, hes reading Homer in Greek. (He also picks up Arabic and Japanese.) Like Telemachus, Ludo wants to find his father, but the only male role models in his life are the characters from Karosawa's The Seven Samurai.

In both novels DeWitt has an engaging style, erudite and readable. She creates dynamic characters who stick with you. Ten years after meeting him, I think of Ludo learning Arabic on the London Tube just about every time I ride the subway in Philadelphia or New York. I fear that I'll be uncomfortable using corporate restrooms for some time to come.