There’s a sentiment pervasive among the people I know that one should not talk about work while socialising. Religion is not off limits, politics is not off limits, but work most definitely is. One of the greatest compliments you can pay a host of a party is to say, in an email the following day: “That was so much fun. I didn’t talk about work once.” In her recently published diary The Folded Clock  the novelist Heidi Julavits writes: “I prefer to have dinner parties where nobody talks about their careers. Isn’t that the mark of a failed dinner party?” I adore Julavits’s books— this one in particular—but I completely disagree.

I like my job! And I like hearing about what my friends do at their jobs, not only because as a writer I’m deprived of office politics and water cooler gossip and delusional bosses, but because most of my friends are lucky enough to enjoy what they do. You are not your career, but you are what you think about, and there’s no escaping the fact that doing something for 40-plus hours a week will determine a great deal of what goes on in your mind.

And so there’s almost nothing I like reading about more than life in the American office. The genre is rich in both comedy (Ed Park’s Personal Days) and mimetic tedium (David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King), but my favourite specimen is Helen DeWitt’s 2011 Lightning Rods, which tells the story of Joe, a struggling salesman and architect of perversely detail-oriented sexual fantasies.

One day, after an onanistic reverie involving made-up game show contestants, Joe has an epiphany. What if workplace sexual harassment could be eliminated? What if carnal impropriety (and the low productivity associated with it) could be solved merely by furnishing a company’s most erotically minded male employees with access to anonymous sex?

Lighting rods, he’ll call them — women who provide secret sexual satisfaction in return for money. Joe gets to work. He places ads in the local papers; he hones elevator pitches; he gets meetings. In due time, companies around the county are outfitted with handicapped bathroom stalls retrofitted for faceless ­fornication.

Joe’s is a descriptivist moralism made evident by empty jargon, meaningless tautologies and cheerful resignation. “Let’s face it,” he likes to say, before making an assumptive declaration. “If you’re in sales” is one of his favourite introductory phrases. A refrain is the literary term for what in life we would call an “annoying verbal tic.” Repeat a line over and over in a book, and it’s an aesthetic choice that your readers will react to with an approving nod. Repeat a line over and over again in speech and whoever you’re talking to will fidget and try to get away from you. In DeWitt’s novel, the redundancy does both.

Like the authors of the best science fiction, DeWitt applies logistical rigour to a riotously imaginative premise. Were the world of the book the same as the world we live in, we’d never tolerate the mundanity she provides: the bureaucratic hurdles, the financial negotiations, the material impediments to tricking out toilets with glory holes.

But it’s just this kind of gratuitous information that lends the novel its necessary plausibility; it’s just this kind of boring nuance that makes up a good part of a worker’s day (or so I hear). DeWitt’s satirical prose, which is rich in italics and ridden with corporate platitudes, succeeds in the unlikely task of getting the reader both to laugh with derision and to agree, however reluctantly, with the optimism and sick logic of our protagonist.

Almost nothing is more satisfying than observing improvement. Like time-lapse footage of a construction site, Lightning Rods is an account of progress, a record of how someone became skillful at something. That the “something” here is anonymous sex on demand as a means of increasing corporate profit is both funny and horrifying.

Alice Gregory is a writer living in New York. Her work has appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe. She is a contributing editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her essay Mavericks, which ran in n+1, was included in the 2014 edition of The Best American Sportswriting