plying to law school—while her back
end, Ngai explains, protrudes “through
a hidden door into a bathroom stall for
the male user to fuck.” Once Joe has
cornered the market on sex, he persuades
his clients to outsource all their tempo-
rary hiring to his company, also called
Lightning Rods.
The comedy of DeWitt’s gim-
mick—a woman embedded in a ma-
chine embedded in a sex service em-
bedded in a temp agency—confirms the
depressing reality of those whom cap-
italism exploits most ruthlessly: women.
It’s not just that women’s labor in the
workplace is increasingly contingent
and precarious; women are also dispro-
portionately responsible for many forms
of unwaged labor—domestic work, child
rearing, arguably even sex. “Capitalism’s
ultimate labor-saving device is just
simply a woman,” Ngai concludes, for
women are “the permanently transient,
cheaper labor used to further cheapen
labor in general.”U
ntil around the end of the Renais-
sance, Ngai suggests, aesthetic de-
vices we might now find gimmicky—
the pneumatic heads in “Don Quixote,”
the talking animal spirits in Margaret
Cavendish’s “The Blazing World,” the
deus ex machina in theatre—were re-
ceived without suspicion. “Devices like
these were wonders, not in any way
equivocal,” Ngai writes. They made “no
particular claim to abbreviating work
on which they could henceforth renege.”
The capitalist gimmick, by contrast, “is
both a wonder and a trick. It is a formwell as the trio of strippers from the
Broadway show “Gypsy,” who, as Ngai
reminds us, sing “You Gotta Get a Gim-
mick.” Why do gimmicks so often fea-
ture a woman performing undervalued
labor? In a memorable moment in James
Joyce’s “Ulysses,” Leopold Bloom re-
calls suggesting to his former boss, a
stationer, that he could drum up busi-
ness by placing in front of his store “a
transparent show cart with two smart
girls inside writing.... Smart girls writ-
ing something catch the eye at once.
Everyone dying to know what she’s
writing.” Bloom’s gimmick grabs atten-
tion by conflating sex with intellectual
labor and, in the process, devaluing
both. The smart girls may be paid to
sit there, but they are not paid for the
writing they do or for men to ogle them.
“Have a finger in the pie. Women too,”
Bloom boasts, hinting that business
and sex might be dispensed by the same
gimmick.
For Ngai, no novelist knows this dy-
namic better than Helen DeWitt, who
draws sexual and intellectual labor to-
gether with zany brilliance in “Light-
ning Rods.” DeWitt’s sleazy hero, Joe,
proposes to solve the problem of sexual
harassment in the workplace by found-
ing a temp agency staffed by women
who provide male employees with on-
site sex, stopping them from harassing
full-time employees. He also comes up
with a gimmick, the Lightning Rod: a
contraption that divides a woman in
half, like the magician sawing his lovely
assistant in two. Her front half performs
intellectual labor—reading Proust, ap-
we marvel at and distrust, admire and
disdain.” And it often arrives overloaded
with unearned praise, wrongful or em-
barrassing hyperbole that one feels com-
pelled to take down a notch.
Perhaps the earliest accusation of lit-
erary gimmickry was made by Samuel
Johnson. In 1775, during a meeting of
the Literary Club, he attacked Jonathan
Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” declaring,
“When once you have thought of big
men and little men, it is very easy to do
all the rest.” It is telling that his criti-
cism hinges on the idea of ease. Swift’s
trick of scale let him avoid the hard work
that Johnson believed was a novelist’s
duty, making him instead the kind of
writer who, as Johnson wrote elsewhere,
scribbled “without the Toil of Study,
without Knowledge of Nature, or Ac-
quaintance with Life.” The high-con-
cept premise of “Gulliver’s Travels” was
a shortcut, a con by which Swift could
smuggle in tired social satire, using fan-
tastic creatures, instead of ordinary hu-
mans, as mouthpieces for his ideas.
From here, one could see the history
of prose fiction as a series of allegations
of gimmickry—of writers’ and critics’
cutting down their predecessors’ sleights,
puncturing the inflated plaudits they
had garnered. To the narrator of Jane
Austen’s “Emma,” sentimental romances,
like the ones Emma imagines herself in
and that Austen’s novels ironize, turn
on coded letters, word games, and other
vehicles “for gallantry and trick.” Both
romance and realism, according to
G. K. Chesterton, were “tricks and tricks
alone,” and he railed against the “tech-