Backlisted - Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

The second novel by by literary wunderkind, Helen DeWitt, Lightning Rods is probably the most challenging book we’ve yet featured on Backlisted. Usually described as a satire on American capitalism, it is the diasarmingly upbeat and funny tale of Joe, a struggling salesman, who develops a new office product that he believes serves an urgent need in modern corporate life. Quite what that product is and how it works requires a delicacy in description and a warning for listeners: this is not one for family listening. We are joined by returning guests, novelist and playwright Marie Philips and writer and performer, Ben Moor. The episode also features Andy rediscovering a lost folk horror classic from the 1970s - The Autumn People (also known as The Autumn Ghosts) by Ruth M. Arthur while John is blown away by the force of Sarah Churchwell’s incandescent and incisive account of an American classic: The Wrath to Come: Gone With the Wind and the Lies America Tells. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 13:21 - The Autumn Ghosts by Ruth M. Arthur. 18:34 - The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells by Sarah Churchwell. 24:42 - Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm * If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Discover more value than ever at Loblaws. Like Fresh Promise. Produce is carefully selected and checked for freshness. And if it's not fresh, it's free.

Yes, you heard that right. From the crispest lettuce to the juiciest apples, Loblaws is committed to fresh, so you get the best fruits and veggies. Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. Marie, where are you today in the world? I am in my own home in Stoke Newington, sitting on the sofa. Nothing very exciting about that. That'd be London then. That would be London, yes, London.

London Borough of Hackney. Formerly Middlesex, in fact. Oh, really? Of course, yes. In Middlesex, in fact. Oh, really? Of course, yes. In Middlesex until the boundary changes of the early 1960s. I always like to make this point when talking about Stoke Newington. Then we have to counter with, well, of course, before it was the home of all the, you know, the detentors,

Daniel Defoe and so on, who's been memorialised by a road that was referred to by all locals as Defoe Road. Oh, yeah. And also Mary W Defoe Road. So, you know. And also Mary Wollstonecraft. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So, no, it's a good spot to be. Meanwhile, somewhere else in London, I assume London,

Ben Moore is on the internet. Yes. This is a very busy time of year for you, isn't it? Because you've just come back from the Latitude Festival in Suffolk. Is Latitude in Suffolk? Yeah, Hennon Park, just near Southwold. And me and the amazing Joanna Neary, we played two authors at a fake author event that goes horribly wrong.

It's called Book Talk, Book Talk, Book. And we're performing it again at the Edinburgh Fringe in August, along with, she's doing another show of her own called Wasp in a Cardigan, and I'm doing two other shows of my own. One's called Pronoun Trouble, and that's a lecture about Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons, but it deals with laundrettes and many other subjects. I don't want to give anything away, but it's amazing. Thank you. And another show called Who Hears Lost,

which is an hour-long story about two oddballs going on a road trip of the soul. And these are all at the Pleasance Courtyard during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Come along. Which is running throughout August. So if you're up at the Book Festival in Edinburgh and you fancy a walk on the wild side by going to the actual Fringe,

you could do that and go and see one of Ben's shows. I know a lot of people say things like their wedding day or attending the birth of their child is the greatest moment of their life. But the greatest moment of my life was seeing Book Talk, Book Talk, Book at the Paul Elliott Festival a few years ago. Well, thank you. No, it's right. But the greatest moment of my life was seeing Book Talk, Book Talk, Book at the Paul Elliott Festival a few years ago.

Thank you. It's right. My wife would agree. She says, you know, the birth of our son was an amazing moment. But from everything I've said about Book Talk, Book Talk, Book, that was clearly that was clearly superior. Why was it superior? Oh, my God. It's the most fantastically clever and funny regurgitation of everything bad about every book I have ever been to. Thanks to Ben and the brilliant Joe Neary. Ben, does it really go over well at book festivals when you do it at book festivals? Essentially, it is exactly designed for that that because I think a literary festival audience

comes with a certain energy and they sit down and they have their questions planned and they have their copies of the books to be signed and all of this. And we just mess with that continuously. And the show changes what it is every five minutes. I was going to say, do do you change it do you kind of adapt it to to no only in the sense that we'll forget the wrong line a different time you know

it'll be different every time but um no essentially it's um it's a it's a it's a trip and the audience kind of goes with it and then they go oh we don we don't get it. Oh, yeah, just enjoy it. And by the end, it becomes this totally other sort of piece of performance art that baffles and delights in two separate ways. I'm presuming you must be a fan of Francis Plug, those books. The biggest fan of Francis Plug, How To Be a Public Author, well Andy of course, alongside Mr Miller, Stones and Piccadilly and it's extraordinary. I mean my piece is very different to what Paul Ewan does with Francis Plug but essentially it is that same experience of

author events, literary festivals and just saying well how do we disrupt this but play with it? Marie, do you enjoy doing events? Yeah, I actually really do. I really like any opportunity to meet people and talk about books. I mean, that's not to say that they have all gone beautifully well. I remember my worst experience, it might have been Latitude even, where I was I was on the bill just before Irvin Welsh and all the Irvin Welsh fans had taken all the front seats

because they wanted to get in there first and the first question to author from the audience was what time is Irvin Welsh on. That was, I think... Oh! That wasn't a great moment. My dream. But I'm an extrovert author, not an introvert author, so I get sick of sitting in my room. Yeah. I'm sort of desperate to meet people, so I get out there and I do enjoy it.

And even, you know, even the occasional Irvin Welsh fan can't keep me down. Well, we enjoy it, don't we, Andy? Oh, I'm like you, Marie. I love an audience. Johnny? Let's kick on with the show. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books.

Today you find us in the reception of an office building in Kansas City. That's Kansas City, Kansas, not Kansas City, Missouri, sometime in 2010. It's a regular office with receptionists busy on the phone and a large man in a smart suit has just placed a bowl of blue peanut M&Ms on the front desk. All seems normal here, even if the disabled toilet gets more use than usual. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, a platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we're joined by two returning guests, Marie Phillips and Ben Moore. Hello, Marie and Ben. Hello. Thank you for coming onto the internet to do this today. Marie Phillips

is an author whose works include the international bestseller Gods Behaving Badly and The Table of Less Valued Knights which was long listed for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction in 2015 and Oh I Do Like to Be a seaside reworking of Shakespeare's play The Comedy of Errors which was published by Unbound in 2019 and as we said last time I reviewed it in a magazine and claimed it was funnier than the original but I stand by those words it is funnier than the comedy of errors well done Marie. Marie spent the last year creating two works of storytelling theatre could you help me say that? Oh La La A. La La la thank you uh two works of storytelling theater la la based on

ovid which toured belgium in march and april and an all-female site-specific version of the odyssey performed earlier in july in an old shipyard in amsterdam goodness that's quite a thing it was amazing it was absolutely amazing um that we should have done in 2020. And then for some strange reason, it got postponed for two years. But I'd been to this shipyard. It's sort of attached to it, to a cafe. And I walked in and I just thought, the Odyssey. It's got a path that winds through the boats. So I put the storytellers along the path.

And then the audience went in little groups and met storytellers as they went along. And each storyteller told one of the women's stories from the odyssey as you go through and then you get the whole story from the from the female perspective it was a fantastic fantastic show marie you also wrote a story for this american life at the end of last year too which means as you so generously put it that you've been on both the best podcasts around thank you what a nice well you are nice thank you i have no more podcast goals i'm done this is it yeah this is it you've been on this before you were on episode 139 where we talked about the evenings by gerard reeve i'm extremely relieved you're not going to make me speak dutch on this particular edition where we talked about The Evenings by Gerard Reeve. What are they? Rev.

I'm extremely relieved you're not going to make me speak Dutch on this particular edition. That was the high point of last time. I had to read it out in Dutch. Marie, the show is young. Yeah, it's changing. I might ask for a Lightning Rods translation on the spot. I'm not sure I have all of the correct vocabulary

to translate Lightning. No. Okay, fair enough. Let's talk about Ben Moore some more. He's excellent. He is an award-winning writer and performer, producing and dramaturging numerous theatre pieces in the UK and Italy over a 30-year career. His solo stage work combines poetic language and heartfelt truths with surreal comedy

and idiosyncratic inventions. And that work has been likened to Lewis Carroll, Douglas Adams, and Robert Lepage. His screen credits include The Queen's Gambit. That's right. Ben Moore, star of The Queen's Gambit. Wow.

Very small part of it. The IT Crowd. Yeah. Knowing Me, Knowing You. And A Monster Calls. He's written for The Guardian and The Idler and is the creator The IT crowd. Yeah. Knowing me, knowing you. And a monster calls. He's written for The Guardian and The Idler and is the creator of the BBC radio series Elastic Planet and Undone and the author of the book More Trees to Climb. His current shows are Who He Has Lost, Pronoun Trouble,

Book Talk, Book Talk, Book Talk. They're on in Edinburgh. The latter has been compared by the comedian Stuart Lee to the work of the author Georges-Louis Borges and I would concur with that analysis Ben Moore has been on Batlister before he joined us at the Port Elliot Festival in 2018 yeah episode 72 with Kathy Rensenbrink to talk about Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. That was tremendously good fun, that show. Marie Phillips, have you read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard? Well, I mean, it's an interesting title that many people have read. And I feel like, you know... Very good.

Very good. The book we're here to discuss is Lightning Wrongs, the second published novel by the American novelist Helen DeWitt. And I use the word published in the heavy inverted commas. It was first released in 2011 by New Directions in the US and Other Stories in the UK. Her first published novel, The Last Samurai, was an international bestseller translated into over 20 languages. But as David Flussfader writes in his introduction to the UK edition of Lightning Rods, nothing in the first book except the pleasures and quality of its prose can prepare you for Lightning Rods.

Often classified as a satire in American capitalism, we will discuss whether that's the right or most helpful classification. It's a disarmingly upbeat and funny book about Joe a struggling salesman who develops a new office product that he believes serves a real need in modern corporate life quite what that product is and how it works requires a delicacy and description and quite possibly a warning for listeners let's just say that what Joe invents is not a more efficient stapler or a new way of dispensing skinny lattes what we can all agree on is that Helen DeWitt is one of the most interesting and challenging of contemporary novelists and in Lightning Rods she's produced a strange and compelling novel, quite possibly a classic. I am just going to

reinforce and make more straightforward the message delivered by my colleague John Mayer. more straightforward the message delivered by my colleague John Mayer. It is difficult to talk about lightning rods, if not impossible to discuss it, without crossing into areas that some listeners may not be comfortable with. So consider this your health warning. If you are easily offended or just standardly offended you may struggle with elements of the book we're going to talk about Ludic fiction is not for you stop here but seriously though we should stop joking about it

it's stronger material than we usually deal with on Backlisted so I feel we have a responsibility to the listeners to give them the option of not listening. And having said that, just keep listening. It's fine. It'll be fine. It's fine. Before we take the elevator and pay a visit to Human Resources, Andy, what have you been reading this week?

been reading this week um thanks john uh i've been reading a novel by uh the scottish writer ruth m arthur uh that was published by glance in 1973 as the autumn people and then republished in 1976 by target books doctor who publisher target books uh as the autumn ghosts they changed the title for the paperback edition three years later and it's a children's book and the reason why I've been reading that this week is I've been very poorly with the Covid it finally caught up with me and as you will all remember if you're listening to this in the month of July or August 2022 we've just been through a really vicious heat wave. And at the absolute apex of the heat wave with COVID, I was chatting on Twitter to our former guest, Alice Stevenson,

and to listener, the unreal Ramona. And Alice Stevenson mentioned that her Twitter avatar is a bit of the cover of a book called The Autumn People by Ruth M. Arthur. And it was on that basis and the fact that it mentioned autumn on the hottest day of the year that I decided to read this book. I rolled the dice, Luke Reinhart style, and this is what it landed on. So what I got in The Autumn People was a surprisingly weird novel, incredibly enjoyable. It's sort of got a 70s folk horror element to it. We're quite used to hearing that description now, aren't we? But it's set on a Scottish isle called Carrousel, and it's split between two time periods, a hundred years apart. A woman and her great-granddaughter meet across time.

And it's sort of like a cross between, John, you'll appreciate this, it's like a cross between Jane Eyre, I Know Where I'm Going, and The Omen. I'm in. I'm in. Is there a bit of sapphire and steel in there?

It sounds like one of Ben's shows. Mute me. Marie, he's definitely read this one. He's definitely read this. All his good stuff comes from the autumn ghosts, or autumn people. They shouldn't have changed that. They should have called it the autumn people.

Anyway, it feels like a sort of starter kit Daphne du Maurier or Mary Stewart. And the plot takes these really impossibly weird terms, almost as though Ruth M. Arthur was making it up as she went along. So I'm just going to read you an example of that now. So Ruth likes to switch it around. So our heroine, whose name is Millie, she's in love with a young gentleman called Jocelyn. I began to think of Jocelyn and to long to see him just for a few minutes, to hear his voice, to touch his hand.

Dare I walk through the dusky garden across the road to Tallow's or was it too late for such a call? Perhaps Jocelyn too felt restless and had a longing for me. Perhaps we would meet in the garden or on the drive if I slipped out quickly now. I stepped out of the open window into the garden. The night was sultry and scented and very still, but I heard the growl of approaching thunder. From the wash house a light shone out and I thought that Roger, a sinister figure, was safely occupied with his photography. I crossed the lawn and followed the path to the empty summer house, then on through the little wood and out to the road, but there was no sign of Jocelyn and the storm was coming nearer.

I'd better get safely indoors before it broke. I turned and doubled back towards the house, then paused a moment in the wood as a fantastic flash of lightning lit the trees and at that moment a shrill terrified scream rose piercingly into the air it came from quite close by the tortured cry of an animal in pain i searched around me bending poking in the undergrowth afraid of finding something trapped mangled but compelled to try to help i found instead a large hole in the bank behind me, hidden by a fallen log and trailing creepers. And as I knelt to look more closely, the scream, feebler this time, came from inside the hole. There was Roger, holding an animal above a naked flame. There was a scuffling noise across the floor. As the animal he'd been torturing escaped to safety,

we stood facing one another. I was panting with rage, my eyes blazing with anger. You devil, I exploded! You cruel, cold devil! He chuckled appreciatively. I like to see you roused, my dear. There's a devil in you, too.

Well. Yeah, sounds like I'll be getting that for my nieces. Can you imagine, readers, as I, reclining on my litter poorly with COVID, felt my heartbeat race and breath hard to come by? What a brilliant book. It was really, really, really enjoyable. It's called The Autumn Ghosts or The Autumn People. And is it still in print, Annie? Oh, no.

There's about to be a stampede onto the internet to get hold of it. Yeah, I was going to say, eight books, look out. You can get it on eBay and that. John, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading The Wrath to Come, Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells by Sarah Churchwell, which has also got its fair share of horror in it. It's, I think, a completely brilliant piece of what I think Sarah does almost better than anyone. Forensic taking a part of a work of literature to understand the culture that produces it.

Like pretty much everybody, she grew up in love with the film. She then read the book and discovered that the book was quite dramatically different in lots of ways to the film. The prolific use of the N-word in the book was not carried over into the film, and she goes into exactly how and why that happened. A lot of it was to do with the protests of the making of film at all. But really what the book's about is the moral complacency at the heart of the making a film at all but really what the book's about is the moral complacency at the heart of the story all the main characters all the main white male characters apart from Rhett Butler are members of the Ku Klux Klan in in is this something that was remarks upon when the book was first published oh yeah so this isn't a bit this isn't hiding in plain sight

it's let's be honest the book became the best-selling book. It's still the best-selling book in American history. The film was the biggest-grossing film, and probably, if you, again, adjust for... It will probably still be the biggest-grossing film, and certainly one of the films that continually is on repeat. So in terms of the... The book is really an attempt to understand the mythos.

It starts with the the it starts with the assault on the capitol building january the 6th 2021 and ask the question what the hell has happened to america and as it turns out understanding uh understanding the novel and the film and the those that combination of uh gone with the Wind is an amazingly useful way. I'm going to not blether, I'm going to read you a little bit because nobody actually explains this better than Sarah. For me, it's a great work of literary criticism, but it's also a great work of cultural criticism.

It's also an important book, as we discover this year in Texas. They have removed from uh from the the curriculum Martin Luther King's I had a dream speech for encouraging discussion of racism which is something I certainly didn't know this the book is full of this it's the first film ever shown in the White House was Birth of a Nation based on the uh the novel The Klansman by Thomas J Dixon so the way that books and films feed American mythology is what really this book is about. So I'll just read you. Here's some great prose from Sarah. Gone with the Wind marks a cultural breakdown, the point where mythology triumphed over history.

It helped derail our understanding of America's past and urging the erasure of Gone with the Wind would simply reinforce that failure, even as the American right is currently engaged in a mighty effort to create another fraudulent history around its new lost cause. This book follows American history back down into the myth to excavate what's been buried, not just the facts the historians have long been carefully bringing to light and upon whose vast scholarship this book depends, but also suppressed psycho-political realities. The lies, the distortions, the justifications, the hearth truths, the rampant projections, the cognitive dissonances, the negations, the flat denials, all the stinging truths Americans don't want to admit about ourselves that Gone with the Wind

caught like flypaper. The many slips of the tongue in Gone with the Wind would matter far less if they were just one writer's unconscious associations, but they were taken up by audiences at a mass scale. It is because the story remains so phenomenally popular that these slips become significant, because they mark losses of control not only in Mitchell's individual narrative, but in the's individual narrative,

but in the American master narrative it captures so fully. Gone with the Wind shows what white America has believed and wanted to believe about its own history. It curates and cultivates America's great white myths about itself. James Baldwin shouted the truth at us half a century ago. James Baldwin shouted the truth at us half a century ago. White man, hear me. History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read, and it does not refer merely or even principally to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways,

and history is present in all that we do. That was in an essay called The White Man's Guilt, part of Baldwin's long frustrating project to try to persuade America to face the dark realities of its history and the legacies of enslavement and segregation. Gone with the Wind captures that great force of history we carry within us. History is present in all it does, controlling it but unconsciously. There is a reckoning in the distance, rolling ever nearer, the reckoning of which Baldwin and others have been warning America for a century and more. It is past time for us to confront what Baldwin said black Americans have. All was seen, spinning above the thoughtless American head, the shape of the wrath to come. This book is part of my effort to look up and

see what was always there, spinning above my thoughtless American head. It's a brilliant book. And it's kind of, I suppose, as a sequel to America First, her previous book. So that's just published? Just published by Head of Zeus. It was commissioned as a short monograph on gone with the winged and turned into a turned into oh she joined us on lot listed when she just finished it or was just finishing it and she has yeah it's amazing well it sounds sounds brilliant actually and also we're going to be talking about lightning rods which in its own peculiar way interrogates founding myths out america too doesn't it surely does how you construct a moral code around an immoral act discuss we can uh we can we can move on to that

seamlessly in a minute we'll be back in just a sec. So before we start talking about Lightning Rods and Helen DeWitt, I thought it might be nice to hear from the author herself. As the survey proved several years ago, becoming an author is the thing that more people want to do than pursue any other career in the UK. And so I thought it might be nice to hear from someone who made it. That's the author of the subject of this book, Helen DeWitt herself. And here she is talking to the Paris Review a few years ago. I had spent seven years trying to write various first novels. And by this time I had, I don't know, maybe 100 unfinished novels. I was in my late 30s. I was working as a legal secretary,

and finally I just thought, you know, I just have to quit and write till my money runs out and not have a job or anything. I'm going to sit down on day one and do nothing but work on this book, and I'm going to finish it in a month, and then I will have a finished book. And see, it doesn't matter what happens then.

You know, I mean, maybe it will get published or maybe it won't, but it will be finished, and then I can go on and get on with my life. Yeah. That was the plan. We'll be hearing from Helen again later during this podcast her career has become part of her persona what we know about her as a writer so we'll come on to that later but Marie could I ask you first when did you first become aware of Helen DeWitt. Was it with The Last Samurai, her big novel from 2000?

I think I was quite late to the party. The New Yorker published a profile of her in 2018, which actually marked the release of her book of short stories. But the profile began with extensive quotes of two of the funniest parts of The Last Samurai, one of which is her description of what she calls the medley, which is the moment in which the main adult woman character in the book has an unbearably awful sexual encounter with a man she nicknames Liberace, who performs on her what she describes in hilarious detail as a sexual medley, swiftly followed by an extensive quote in which she discusses the joys of being American in Britain and seeing all of the different fried chicken shops named after states that do not traditionally

fry chicken. I was living in Amsterdam at the time. There are good English language bookshops in Amsterdam, but you can't always find everything you need. So to my immense surprise, when I was looking for it again, I discovered that I had downloaded it on my Kindle. And looking back, I suspect that I downloaded it that very moment before even finishing the article. And then after reading The Last Samurai, I looked up to see how many other books she published, which is very few. few and I made a decision at that point that I could not immediately read Lightning Rods even though I wanted to because because then it would all it would be gone like I wouldn't have enough Helen DeWitt to keep me going yeah um so I had to I sort of had to hold back for for a couple more years until I couldn't take it anymore and I just needed more Helen DeWitt in my life and then I went out and got Lightning Rods. So as John was saying she's published two full-length novels The Last Samurai which was

published in 2000 and Lightning Rods which was published in 2011 though both those books were written in the 1990s. She's written as far as we know in various stages of completion many more books as she was just saying but so far only two of them have made it off her hard drive and into print then when did you read lightning rods when it came out or or more recently very very close to when it came out in 2012 because it was a runner in the tournament of books. I don't know. It's another of the great, like backlisted. It's a great book thing. Essentially, a website called the Morning News hosts during March Madness, you know, when the basketball tournament or the college basketball brackets happen in America. Essentially, it's a tournament of books where there was a bracket and the 16 novels at the

beginning of the tournament. Two books are sent to one reviewer, one critic. They write an essay and they advance one book throughout the tournament and so on and so forth until we get to the winners of the semifinal. Then they have to have a zombie round where the readers of the website get to resurrect their favourite books that have already been knocked out until we get to the final. And Helen DeWitt had an amazing run in the Tournament of Books in 2012. And she actually got to the semifinal where she was up against Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers. And it was kind of, yeah, I know, two DeWitts and one, two DeWitts enter, one DeWitt leaves. But over the years, this the Tournament of Books has just been an absolute joy. Every March you get to learn about these books and you get to know them through these different reviewers as they go through different rounds.

So what did you know about it then before you started reading it? you started reading it? Well, only the little pieces of criticism, little bits of, they're sort of reviews, but they're sort of essays about the reading experience, because how can you judge art against art? Essentially, a lot of these people that are judging in the tournament of books are saying, well, this speaks to me in this way, and I found this connection with the two books this way. And it just seemed so interesting, because there were so many things that the reviewers, the writers couldn't actually say about Lightning Rods, that it just sounded, well, I need to read this,

because I need to understand what they're not saying. Can I ask Marie the same question? Did you know much about this novel before you started reading it? I did not. And can I ask you both then, given the health warning we issued earlier, and John as well, John, had you read this before? How did you feel when you've read the first few pages thinking,

what, oh, this is going to be about, oh, this is going to be about this? I listened to it, actually. I listened to the audio book. I listened to the audio book. I haven't laughed as much. I mean, it's quite a good audio book. It's quite well read. I haven't laughed as much for a long time just because I felt like I was in the tractor beam of something that I could not escape from.

It was so, the setup is so perfect. It's so it was the setup is so it's so perfect. It's so it's it's it's so chummy. It's kind of like an American guy buying your beer and giving you all his home homespun philosophy and it getting madder and madder and madder. And I mean, you know, it was only a couple of hours, but it was far enough into it to see where the book was going. And then I have to say, I read it very quickly after that. As a writer, I scribble down the phrase furious logic. Yes. I say furious logic because of both the tightness of the concepts which she refuses to break,

but also there's something infuriated about how she proceeds with telling you what she wants to tell you something is really under has got under her skin to present the the fact of the book to you in such a kind of defying you to argue back that's's how I felt. I felt I was being presented with something where I was, as a reader, I was being told, come on, you can't respond to this. You cannot argue with me on this. I have nailed this down. Does anybody want to attempt, for Nicky's benefit and for our listeners' benefit, to say what it's about?

No. Oh, please. Sorry. I will. Thank you, Marie. I will pick up that gauntlet. Go on, Marie. So the premise is that the central character,

who is at the beginning of the book a failed salesman, having failed to sell the Encyclopedia Britannica and having failed to sell Electrolux vacuum cleaners, comes up with a new idea based on one of his own sexual fantasies that he is going to sell a solution to work-based sexual harassment, a solution to work-based sexual harassment, which involves providing companies with what he describes as lightning rods, which is a facility in which in the privacy of the disabled toilet,

a panel will slide aside and a woman's hindquarters, bare hindquarters, will be reversed into the room so that a man who might otherwise commit sexual harassment will relieve his urges into this convenient live receptacle. This is not what I was expecting. Can I just say? Right. That's a beautiful... Please show some appreciation. It's all completely anonymised and for which the woman gets paid an extremely attractive financial bonus. Very reasonable.

So once she's set this up, she basically examines it from every possible angle in the form of the protagonist, this salesman has to go through every possible uh permutation and detail um and yes it's very important that it's anonymous for both people concerned so he has to set up an entire temping agency only some of whom are lightning rods in order to to provide a large enough pool of women in the company so that nobody knows which of the women are the ones who are occasionally slipping off um to to perform the sets they all also have to have excellent typing skills

and be fantastic pas etc etc and and there's. And there's all kinds of things about how do you then protect the anonymity of the men, and that's done through a sort of randomised computer programme that sort of just pings on their screen saying, it's your turn, off you go. And they'll just, you know, slip away to the bathroom and, you know, do the necessary. But it's like the top of a bobsleigh track, isn't it? Because when you start the story, it can only keep going into different concepts, different challenges.

I mean, I think the main character is the idea rather than the guy. Do you know what I mean? Because it's the idea that faces all these challenges. So it's a novel of an idea, but it's not, you know, it doesn't seek, well, it goes through different characters and different plot. There's not an awful lot of plot in it, but it just keeps testing you as a reader and as an idea.

Yeah. I would say I issue these proclamations sparingly because I want to keep away from hype. So I only say them when I've thought about them and I mean them. I think this is the best novel, the best satirical novel that I've read this century. I can't think of a better satirical novel than Lightning Rods. It's a satire of so many things that I don't even know what it's a satire of.

I could list for you, and maybe we'll come on to that, various elements that seem to me satirical of specific things. But the thing you've both just talked about, and John was talking about it being like a tightrope walk or a high wire act, it's how she picks her way through via a series of perfectly logical stages, through via a series of perfectly logical stages what you would need to do in the american workplace and society to render this idea if not acceptable then widely adopted while also she does a brilliant thing marie i think where every so often she breaks her own frame, where a character will go,

what? Are you kidding? Just to let every so often let you, the reader, know that there is a map. You're not totally out there on your own. I wonder, could I read a little bit from the beginning just to set this up and thank Marie and Ben already for their bravery in describing what they've just described.

So I'm going to read a bit where Joe the salesman is talking near the beginning, the section that Marie was referring to. And listeners, just keep count of the number of cliches or motivational cliches that Joe speaks to us while he's describing his situation. What most people assume is that you can answer a question just by looking at a map. And what they overlook is the fact that when you start a new job, it's important to give it everything you've got. It's important to give that new job 101%, 25 hours a day, 366 days a year. You simply can't afford to have any distractions. If the reason you gave up your old job was that it was not sufficiently remunerative to enable you to meet your commitments, you may well find yourself with some debts which it would

be distracting to deal with at this time. It's absolutely vital to start the new job in an area where any difficulties you may have experienced in the past are unlikely to lead to unwelcome distractions. He needed to be based in a locality presenting no foreseeable distractions and he selected the nearest Electrolux office which would enable him to meet that need and he walked straight in. When you're in sales you've always got one thing to sell and that's yourself. He walked in and started talking about what he could do for Electrolux sales and they said you're that good? All I ask is the chance to show what I can do he sales and they said, you're that good? All I ask is the chance to show what I can do, he said. And they said, all right, hotshot, let's see what you

can do. And they gave him a district. He familiarised himself with the product and moved to Eureka and rented a trailer. The next day he got cracking. By the end of the week, he realised that this was not going to be as easy as it looked, because every single house he went to had the same story to tell. They already had an Electrolux. They bought it just after Hurricane Edna, and it was one of the best things they'd ever done. The customer would then insist on dragging out the faithful Electrolux and singing its praises. Yes, sir, the customer would say, reckon I'll break down before this thing does. Anyway, we go on with Joe describing this trap he's constructed for himself.

Then he says, he managed to make one sale to someone who had just moved into the area. The result was that he spent a lot of time in the trailer trying to get up the energy to go out. He would lie in bed with a magazine, or sometimes he would watch a video, or sometimes he used fantasies of his own. Now that, listeners, is the line where I went,

what? That's gone. What's going now? Because I knew nothing about this going in. Nothing. Yeah, it's good not to read even Because I knew nothing about this going in. Nothing. Yeah, it's good not to read even the blurb on the back, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Marie, when you came to it, having read, I read Lightning Rods and then I read Last Samurai. So I'm very late to the DeWitt party. Did it kind of live up to your DeWittian expectations, having read the first book? very much yes and no it is so different from the last samurai and a lot of the time if you have if you have beloved authors or great authors um i mean if you think of anyone from you know dickens austin whoever you want woodhouse anyone you want to choose, they might have written a lot of really good books, but they tend to stay within their lane. And that's not necessarily a

problem. You sort of know what you're getting. You think, oh, I feel like reading that. You read The Last Samurai, and then you read Lightning Rods. And the thing that connects them, I mean, when you look more deeply, there are more things that connect them, but they are so different in style and voice that I was like, wait, hang on. This doesn't feel like I'm reading the same kind of thing again. And yet the intelligence, the wit, the humor, the willingness to push an idea to its most insane, extreme, the preoccupation with weirdness of genius i would say because this man is a genius salesman and he's also very underneath his plausible american exterior he's a very strange person and helen dewitt loves a strange person so i mean i loved it as much as i loved the last samurai so in that respect, I was delighted.

But I was very surprised because I did not know what I was getting myself into until it was too late. Yeah. Like so many characters in this book. Or not. Yes, indeed. Roy. Roy Roy the one who

somehow accidentally is in the disabled loo just using it as it was originally intended I know but now I've read more DeWitt right now I see Roy of course is the measurement guy he's the guy using she's obsessed with measurements isn't she

she's obsessed I've never come across anybody who's got as much passion for the work of Edward Tuft as I have. Edward Tuft makes some of the most beautiful books I own are by Edward Tuft, and it's all about the visualization of knowledge over sort of centuries so maps finding different ways of showing information through graphs and maps and and um she's fascinated by what data uh the examination of data in a way that i think there aren't a lot of contemporary novelists who who would have the same obsession with statistics and data and it's data that that roy begins to spot that the um that the effect of the lightning rods is having it's it's people are taking many fewer less sick days and he smells a rat what i like about her is she fixes on an idea partly i think for artistic reasons but partly as an extension of personality. And there's a wonderful interview, which you can see on YouTube,

which I'm going to say a little bit more about later, and we'll put a link to it on our website. She talks about springtime for Hitler from the producers. And she says about lightning rods, well, lightning rods, you know, at some level, it's not an attempt to outdo or to emulate springtime for Hitler. Springtime for Hitler is incredibly freeing. That's the perfect expression of that idea. How then can you operate in the shadow of springtime for Hitler?

I'm assuming anyone listening to this is familiar with the producers and with springtime for Hitler. listening to this is familiar with the producers and with Springtime for Hitler. But yes, I could see that Lightning Rose does indeed operate in a similar kind of, what if we present an unacceptable idea and pretend no one will blink? Yeah, and I think it's funny because she does mention it at the very end in the acknowledgement, she mentions that, but actually the book that I was thinking about the entire time reading this, or essay I should say, is Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. And it's I feel like it's the closest cousin to that. Yeah. Yes. Shocking essay where you begin in a place of.

Well, I mean, it's hard to say that this book begins in a place of reasonableness but where you take an idea that is so appalling and present it as something that is entirely reasonable in such a way that that all the way through it's very difficult to argue against the point being made um even though you know that it's absolutely wrong. Well, it's almost written in the style of a business biography, the sort of, I think I read somewhere someone compared it to Michael Lewis, written in a future time where we're looking back on this thing that everyone kind of is aware of and all the names, no one's given a surname or anything, they might have been names have been changed or whatever

because it feels like, oh, this is the story of the creation of this thing. Yes. We don't know people's backgrounds particularly. We get little digressions. One chap that's helped a lot starts a lovely relationship with one of his colleagues and takes a daughter out for meals and they have a lovely time because he's been improved by the lightning rods process so yeah i mean i i would also compare it to something more recent the apple tv show severance are you only is anyone familiar with that i haven't

seen it though okay so it's set in a an office environment and it takes a little bit like it's not um the same sort of subject as lightning rods but it suggests what if we do this for our employees what would be the effect on their home life their their life outside the workplace and the life inside the workplace also a novel called company by max barry i don't know and then know. And then we came to the end, Joshua Ferris. Well, I love that. It's a wonderful book. Yeah. So there's a series of sort of corporate novels and works that are saying, this is the workplace. How can we take it to an extreme?

I mean, ultimately, the central idea in the book is horrendously insulting to men. I mean, ultimately, the central idea in the book is horrendously insulting to men. I mean, the idea that men would have almost all their sexual needs met by a hole on legs. There's occasional moments where one of the men in the book thinks they start to miss the top half of a woman. But essentially, essentially it works and at times I found myself thinking does she actually believe what she said I mean on some level does does Helen DeWitt think obviously this is grotesque but basically it would do the job exactly as I'm describing. If it was acceptable, this would actually, it would work just the way that I am describing it. It's a terrifying thought because it does make you confront, well, what drives sexual harassment? What are men's sexual urges like?

What do men need? What do men want? And all of her books have moments of, I would say, disgust for male sexuality. It comes up over and over again where a female character is just being subjected to like the medley in The Last Samurai. It comes up in some of her short stories as well. So she really doesn't have a lot of time for the way that male sexuality works or that male sexuality works for many men. So yeah, I mean, one of the things that's fascinating while you're reading this is how just how cheeky is she being right now? Just how much does she believe what she's saying, while presenting it as something that is completely outrageous? Does she think, yeah, but deep down, this is really what men need, just a whole.

Her method, it seems to me, her method as a writer is she simultaneously needs to be the person who believes it. So she has to prove it to her own satisfaction. And the voice going, whoa, hang on a minute. She has both those things going on simultaneously. Otherwise, it's not funny. If you didn't have both, would you have something funny? No, you'd have something that proved a point, but not necessarily humorously.

Is it offensive? Well, is it offensive? I do not find it offensive because it is written by a woman who is making clear that all of the people who buy into this are idiots. Yeah. Except for a number of women who pragmatically choose to participate and then end up making a fortune and becoming supreme court judges or millionaire litigators because they use the money to put themselves through harvard business school and there's a

strange digression in the book which is to do with dwarfs, where the main character meets a dwarf on a bus and then gets very preoccupied in the fact that adequate bathroom facilities are not being provided for dwarves. And he spends more time thinking about bathroom facilities for dwarves than he spends thinking about what being either a lightning rod or a woman on the receiving end of sexual harassment might be like, all of this is done. The whole thing, we should make clear, is not set up to protect women from sexual harassment. It's to protect men from unfortunately, well, it's to protect men from their unfortunate urges and to protect companies from having to deal with sexual harassment lawsuits. unfortunate urges to protect companies from having to deal with sexual harassment lawsuits the the the fact that women then end up not getting sexually harassed is a pleasant byproduct of of the idea but not this not the central purpose of it again the satire on corporate america or

on american society at large is here here is the idea that you just described, Marie. The men are all idiots. The women are demonstrably more developed intellectually and morally, yet the whole business and society is built around the idiotic men to protect the idiotic men. That seems to me a perennial theme. Marie, have you got a bit that's especially relevant to what we've just been talking about? As chance would have it, I do indeed. He knew from the first moment he set eyes on them

that the guys were a bunch of arseholes. They all reacted in exactly the same stupid way. Let me get this straight, they would say. The company is offering this as a part of its sexual harassment policy? Oh boy. He had to remind himself that these people were keeping him in business. It was the fact that they were arseholes that had left the CEO of a competitive company at his wits end of how to deal with them.

If they hadn't been grade A assholes, the CEO would probably not have taken a giant step for mankind in being the first American executive to introduce lightning rods to the workplace. Besides, the thing to remember was that it was probably not their fault that they were assholes. They were not to blame for their upbringing. All you had to do was talk to them to realize that these were people with no class. It wasn't their fault. They'd just been brought up that way. The way to look at it was, if a guy, through no fault of his own, has not been brought up to treat women with respect, is it fair that his whole career should be put in jeopardy?

Is it fair that on top of the disadvantage he has anyway in competing against guys who've been to Harvard and Yale, that he should have the additional handicap of endangering his career every time he is in the vicinity of female personnel? No, that isn't fair. And an egalitarian employer with a commitment to democracy will do everything in its power to remove the obstacles in the path of disadvantaged employees. Hell, they're legally obligated to provide a disabled toilet. Well, just because the law doesn't compel an employer to consider the needs of socially disadvantaged employees

doesn't mean an enlightened employer can't be ahead of his time. That was just how Joe got himself through it, as he talked to one prized arsehole after another. It was hard work, no two ways about it, but it was worth it. Besides, it was nothing as compared to the almighty hassle of writing another software brilliant brilliant brilliant so i was saying earlier that i think the novel is a satire but the levels of satire within it are multiple and uh all great books as we always say on batlisted are fundamentally books about books and it seems to me that a lot of helen dewitt's work has become uh about the her her awful

experiences with the publishing industry and indeed i referred to the interview earlier that's on youtube uh from 2011 there's a half hour interview really revelatory to me where she talks about lightning rods and somebody asks her you know were you channeling any of your frustration with the publishing world into enlightening rods and she says are you asking me if being published was like being fucked from behind through a hole in the wall yes it was so that i think is one of the things actually that a lot of the energy from lightning rods is coming from her uh furious logic or logical fury about her early dealings with the publishing industry she'd been approached on

her first book, The Last Samurai, to make some editorial changes. She was asked to make so many changes by a copy editor that she seemed to have spiraled into some kind of depression or fury and so decided what she would do was write 10 more novels which were only about one thing each rather than one novel that was about 10 things so she writes lightning rods relatively fast before the lasturai is published in 2000. Then The Last Samurai is published, does very well, and then no one will publish Lightning Rods because it doesn't fit with the sort of novel they think they can do something with after the success of The Last Samurai.

Because she got a huge advance. Yeah, so both novels are written before anything has been published by her. So the idea, Ben, that Lightning Rods is about artistic frustration as much as other kinds of frustration seems quite relevant to me. Absolutely. Well, it's almost like a Charlie Kaufman type thing where he can do a film about adapting a film and create a film that's not only a satire about adaptations

but also follows the rules of adaptations. I mean, there's an amazing bit. If you, any screenwriter who watches something like Adaptation, which is a satire on how adaptations happen, Robert McKee, played by Brian Cox in the film, and he says, I'm not going to follow the McKee structure. But of course, if you know the McKee structure, there's lots of jokes about it.

And in fact, Lightning Rods does the same thing. There's a scene towards the end, which is the negation of the negation. And hello, screenwriters, you've just waved your arms in the air and said, oh, my God, the negation of the negation. And if you know what that means and you spot it in Lightning Rods, it's an extraordinary moment. That's why someone like, you know, Charlie Kaufman is as brilliant as Helen DeWitt is, because Helen DeWitt not only talks about taking the idea as far as it can go, but also her process is about, you know, taking the idea.

is about you know taking the idea i mean ironically it was one of the companies that had the problem with the publication is um one of the ones that was most affected by the me too scandal you know in 2017 and all of that miramax right so the last samurai is published by talk miramax the the publishing arm marie we had a conversation before we recorded about whether Lightning Rods was or is, crucially, ahead of its time. And I think we agree to disagree, don't we? Do you think it's ahead of its time? I do not. I think that it anticipates Me Too in quite obvious ways. But I think that to consider it ahead of its time is to see the idea that sexual harassment only became an issue after

Me Too, or that people only spoke about sexual harassment after Me Too. And I think that that really fundamentally misunderstands the situation because women have been experiencing sexual harassment at work since the invention of work, and women have been talking about it and writing about it and discussing it all that time. But it has never reached mainstream culture because on the whole, men are still the gatekeepers of what is considered to be the mainstream and anything that only appeals to women is considered to be a marginal topic. So I do not like to call it ahead of its time because that suggests that nobody else was talking about this then.

I prefer to say that the time was late and the book was on book was on time but the time was late i think this is why we agree to disagree i think what i mean is if this book were published now it would find a more receptive and widespread audience i do agree yes the. The deal, the background to the Miramax, she was offered 200k eventually by Miramax for a book on poker and lightning rods. The book on poker was supposed to come. She didn't think that lightning rods would make a good second novel. Anyway, they gave her 200k and then they didn't give her any of the technical support. They'd say that they were going to give her to do the poker book so the poker book went away

and then they decided not to publish Lightning Rods so she was left having moved to New York to work on it's a pretty bad I wonder why Miramax didn't want to publish Lightning Rods it's mysterious

isn't it I urge anyone who is enjoying this discussion to check out this interview with her um on youtube where she goes through the titles and subject matter of nine or ten unfinished novels on her laptop she's like um paddy McAloon from Prefab Sprout, who supposedly has a dozen finished albums ready to go, just waiting to be released. She had a hundred at one point, she said. A hundred, she said, didn't she? Yeah. So we're going to have to wrap up

in a minute, but I really would love to hear from Ben, who I know has prepared this section to read us. I think this is about midway through the book, isn't it, Ben? Pretty early, actually. It's in section two of the book, First Impressions. Okay. Joe was the first to admit that he'd made a lot of mistakes

when he started out. He worried about all the wrong things. The way he looked at it at first was take it slow, build up gradually. So the first thing he decided to try, if you can believe it, was a kind of office-oriented version of spin the bottle. But the one thing he got right was that it was important to look good. In the trailer, he'd only seen himself in the bathroom mirror that he used to shave in. Seeing himself in the office mirror had come as a shock. In fact, it had made him wonder whether he had actually been sane when he

bought that suit in the first place. Why would anybody buy a shit-coloured suit? Why would that have seemed even momentarily a good idea? All right, it was on sale at the time, originally a $99 suit. It had been reduced to $49.99 with a choice of tie. But wouldn't you think you would at least wonder why they hadn't been able to sell it at $99.99? Wouldn't you think you would look at it and think, oh, I bet the reason they couldn't sell it at $99.99 was that nobody wanted to buy a suit that went with their turds. But no, he'd just gone in and said, hey, $ and it fits and it's 100 polyester so it won't get

wrinkled jesus i've been very paranoid that helen dewitt might listen to this podcast and uh have strong views about what she hears on it uh i don't know if my fellow panelists feel the same maybe they don't and i was particularly panelists feel the same. Maybe they don't. And I was particularly anxious about what to say biographically. So what I've done is I'm just going to read out her biography that she's written herself that's on her website. So hopefully she can't find anything to object to in it. But also it's funny. So here we go. Helen DeWitt is the daughter of American diplomats. She was born in is the daughter of American diplomats. She was born in a suburb of Washington, D.C., and grew up mainly in Latin America, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador.

She gets hit up for donations slash invited to reunions by Collegio Bolivar, Cali, Collegio Americano de Guayaquil, Northfield Mount Hermon, Smith College, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Brasenose College, Oxford, GHS, the eponymous high school of the town that is home to the fighting gators, is missing a trick, as are others too numerous to encourage. She has a BA and indeed Oxford MA in Literari Humanioris and a DPhil in Greek and Latin literature. Editors of previous bios have liked the 15-odd languages and the varied work history, conversion to Judaism in 1985, UK naturalisation 1999 and late-onset lesbianism have been seen as TMI. Roland Barthes does say that an author's life can't be written by the author.

If Helen DeWitt is listening and wants to email me any of her unfinished novels, my inbox awaits. my inbox awaits well the most exciting thing to say at this point is you'll hear this probably in August late July or August 2022 the month of publication of a new

short book by Helen DeWitt called The English Understand Wool which we've been fortunate enough to read many thanks to new directions for supplying us with a galley copy of it i thought it was brilliant uh john and marie what did you what did you make of it yes i loved it every every bit of helenWitt is unlike every other bit of Helen DeWitt. But there is that kind of obsessive intelligence. I mean, she's fascinated by language. I mean, she famously speaks about eight, nine languages pretty fluently.

She said, reading and speaking another language is like stepping into an alternate history of yourself where all the bad connotations are gone and this is another this is just another manifestation of um of her extraordinary intelligence and and what i would call wit she's the one of the wittiest writers in that full 18th century sense the sense of the term marie i would say she's witty and funny and that's not often the same. You don't often get those two things together at the same time. She does wit and she does jokes. And those are not the same thing. And it's true. I mean, I feel like one thing I'd really love to say is The Last Samurai definitely has some pockets where you can get a bit lost. But on the whole, they sort of go down without touching the sides. I mean, she's incredibly intelligent. She's

unbelievably erudite. In fact, I think given how much she writes about genius, I think she is a genius, bona fide genius. No doubt about it. You know, if it's a new book, you can just read your way through it. And it's so well constructed. It's so perfectly put together. It's such a charming and it's got a stiletto point of sharpness.

It's got a scalpel at the heart of it. But it's not difficult to read. It's downhill skiing. You know, once you're in, you're in. Elegant. So elegantly written. Elegant. So elegant.

Anyone who listens to this podcast who enjoys furious and dyspeptic books about publishers, this is one for you. So that's published by New Directions. That's called The English Understand Wall. That's out this month. Last Samurai is back in print. Lightning Rods is currently available, I believe, from New Directions and other stories. Some Trick, a book of her short stories, I believe, from New Directions and other stories. Some Trick, a book of her short stories, published in 2018 by New Directions.

And finally, her PDF novel or the novel that was available as a PDF, which she co-wrote with Ilya Gridnev called Your Name Here, is getting a full commercial release next year. So that's exciting. There you go. Good news. More Helen DeWitt is something we can all agree on. Brilliant. I mean, I have to say, what a joy to discover her work. And I'm afraid that is all we have time for.

We must say farewell to Joe and his extraordinary invention and offer huge thanks to Marie and Ben for helping us tackle such a strange and wonderful book, to Nicky for making us sound like we're all in the same office and to Unbound for all the magic meals. You can download all 167 previous episodes of Batlisted plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website batlisted.fm

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where we indulge in grey sky thinking and try to remember the books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. I would like to thank John Mitchinson for not going where I thought he might go with that particular point of comparison. Well done, John. Lot listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's new patrons include...

a mark of our thanks and appreciation and this week's new patrons include jonna crow lucy troloa lauren madden doyle thank you all for your generosity and to all our patrons huge thanks for enabling us to continue to do what we love and enjoy ah thanks everyone i enjoyed reading and thinking about this so much this funny funny book thank you ben and thank you marie yes brilliant bless you bye My father called and he started haranguing me and saying, well, you know, you don't think there's any hope and just kind of really shouting at me. After this phone conversation, I just said, you know, we don't pick our parents. If we could pick, I'm sure I would have picked better than you. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted.

As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call lock listed which is andy me and nikki talking about the books music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight