At the appointed time, Mr. Lethem and playwright Lynn Nottage—along with of-the-moment novelist Jennifer Egan—arrived with a small entourage of camera people. The three literary powerhouses—who among them share two Pulitzer prizes, two Guggenheim Fellowships, two MacArthur awards and two National Book Critics Circle awards—were welcomed by eager lit-fans and indifferent bystanders. Per usual, the climate at the park was that of camaraderie, mildew and unrest.

Dressed in a velvety blue blazer, grey Nike tennis shoes and tortoise shell glasses, Mr. Lethem adressed the modest crowd, “This is a lucky day for me to stand before you. I wish I could offer something in return to what you’ve given me.”

The author—whose collection The Ecstasy of Influence was just released by Doubleday (a subsidiary of Bertlesmann)—condemned the cynical press and unruly corporate regimes, while asserting they’re merely as-yet-unconverted members of the 99%.

He compared O.W.S. to the greatest service call of all time. “Even those who sneer or berate,” he proclaimed, “they’re one of you—one of us—just not willing—not yet—to see it. What do you do with a call like that? Best is to summon these words: ‘I’d like to speak to your supervisor’ and when the so-called supervisor appears, now your supervisor. And so on up the line!”
He closed with insistence an that O.W.S. push for more fiscal responsibility in regards to big business.

Afterward, The Observer asked about the artist’s place in O.W.S. and Mr. Lethem made himself clear: “An equal place to any other citizen, with no particular privileges. I wouldn’t presume any more than that.”

Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan and Lynn Nottage

Ms. Egan chose not to address the protesters, but tagged along to support Mr. Lethem. “I had never been here before,” she told us. “I was curious to be an observer,” she said. “I am not against speaking, but I think you should speak when you really know what you want to say.”

Ms. Nottage knew what she wanted to say. Clutching two sheets of typed prose, she adressed the crowd, “As a writer I believe firmly in the power of the narrative, and somehow our national narrative has been corrupted. Our story used to be simple; it was driven by the notion that hard work, compassion and community meant something.”

The playwright imparted sentiments similar to Mr. Lethem’s: “I’m not a megaphone of the movement. I am just one of many voices in a collective movement. I am not just here to shout louder than anyone else, but to be part of the den.”

A cynical eye might dismiss the group’s philanthropy as another jump onto the “celebrities save Haiti” bandwagon. However, the band’s foundation, Music for Relief, has had its hand in a vast array of humanitarian efforts since its formation in 2004. (We suppose we can set aside any notions of the band capitalizing on altruism for notoriety.) After all do you even know what any of these guys look like? The band has sold over 50 million records, but largely remain out of the public eye.

The U.N. Foundation will handle the grunt work of implementing the sustainable energy programs, with a focus in Haiti where 10 million have no access to electricity.

Linkin Park and The Secretary-General have partnered before, believe it or not, hosting a live Facebook Townhall meeting regarding disaster relief. “Most recently we collaborated in our efforts to help in the disaster relief initiatives in Haiti,” guitarist Brad Delson told The Observer. “Our fans helped to get these solar lamps, which our bass player Phoenix got to see; he went to Haiti and saw those camps down there.”

Though new to the subject of energy sustainability, drummer Rob Bourdon admitted to The Observer he was unaware 1.4 billion people worldwide don't have access to electricity, the band is conscious of what it can do.

“I think we have the unique ability to bring our fans, people in the music community, and fans of other bands to help with natural disasters and global warming,” said Mr. Bourdon. “When the UN posted video footage of Haiti it had 6,000 views. When we posted the footage and added our music it got 9.5 million.” Mr. Bourdon is referring to Linkin Park’s “Not Alone” video, which uses the U.N.’s graphic imagery of the Haiti earthquake aftermath.

The Secretary-General’s plan is to ensure universal access to modern energy services, double the rate of energy efficiency and double the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix.

"Lightning Rods."

Helen Dewitt’s new novel, Lightning Rods (New Directions, 192 pages, $24.95), takes place in an America outside time. This America is in some ways aggressively contemporary, a lawsuit-plagued land of the horny and the litigious. But it is also backward-looking, insofar as it’s a landscape roamed by door-to-door salesmen, a breed whose numbers have, in reality, probably dwindled to bison levels but who, in Ms. Dewitt’s novel, are as ready as ever to offer encyclopedias and Electrolux vacuum cleaners to the unsuspecting housewives of the Midwest. They receive home-baked pie, these salesmen.

Our hero, a floundering salesman named Joe, has tried his hand at both Britannica and vacuums when he hits upon his big idea. What, Joe wonders, separates man from beast? Shame, he decides. What causes shame? Sex. Where does sex-shame create problems? In the workplace, since men’s poorly suppressed urges manifest themselves as unwanted harassment, thereby risking costly lawsuits. The only way to avoid harassment and lawsuits is through the use—bear with Joe, and Ms. Dewitt—of lightning rods, “bifunctional” employees, women who take occasional breaks from data entry to stick their anonymous hindquarters through a specially designed portal to the men’s room.

A lightning rod is not a prostitute, as Joe must repeatedly explain. She is “the kind of woman who has aims she wants to achieve.” She is “someone who wants to make a real contribution to the company and expects to be compensated accordingly.” She can be confident that no one besides Joe will know the exact nature of her job description. As he recruits his gals (always “gals”), Joe explains that the type he’s looking for is one woman in a thousand, a figure he will eventually revise to one in a million. He manages to convince only one executive to institute a policy of “proactive sexual harassment management” for his company, but once that plan is in action, it takes on a life of its own.

Lightning Rods is an exercise in novel as extrapolation. Ms. Dewitt’s method is to introduce a device into the world as we know it and systematically explore how the world reacts to that device. Joe’s original moment of epiphany is almost superfluous; the real fun results once the idea exists and must be dealt with. Ms. Dewitt creates the problems, identifies the problems, and then figures out how to solve them. It’s an appealingly practical way to think about writing fiction, and one that ignores any distinction between realism and fantasy. What would a gay employee make of his straight employer’s institutionalized glory holes? How to preserve anonymity if a black gal wants to join the team? And is there a way to get rid of the toilets?

“The fact is,” Joe thinks, “every great salesman has doubts. In fact, a great salesman has more doubts than anyone else. Because what those doubts are, is the questions other people are going to be asking you. A great salesman is able to anticipate a wider range of questions than other people. And instead of just hoping they’ll go away, a great salesman uses those doubts as a chance to tackle those questions head on.” Ms. Dewitt puts herself in the same position as Joe, serving as “Head Office, Product Development, and Sales all in one”; and as Joe soon discovers, creative control and commercial hustle make an uneasy combination. Ms. Dewitt can sympathize. After publishing a first book, The Last Samurai, that Sam Anderson called “arguably the most exciting debut novel of the decade,” she failed to find a publisher for her very different follow-up, had a falling out with her agent and experimented with self-publishing online. Making things up is hard; making people pay for things is another project entirely.

Lightning Rods takes aim at salesmanship generally. Corporate culture is an easy satirical target, however, and the novel lacks the specificity to really skewer it in a surprising way. We never find out what this major company does or how exactly its top performers (the ones first entitled to lightning rod access) have demonstrated their impressive earning power. The subtle absurdities and indignities of office life don’t interest Ms. Dewitt. It’s the always-selling, all-American, self-perpetuating love of innovation that Lightning Rods more effectively mocks. A culture that devises “Freedom” from the Internet is a culture that would consider hiring guaranteed-non-sex-worker temps from the man who brought them the sex-worker temps in the first place.

Lightning Rods narrates Joe’s journey in the manner of a motivational speaker, folksy and relentlessly encouraging. “When you’re a kid you always think you’re going to be an astronaut, or a quarterback, or something like that,” Joe thinks. “You can’t understand why so many grown-ups spend their lives doing boring things like selling vacuum cleaners.” But in Lightning Rods everyone is always reminding himself that he too can make a contribution to a better society, that he too has special skills to offer. “A good personnel officer knows there are times when you don’t know exactly how to respond,” we’re told at one point. “A good FBI agent knows when his words have struck home,” we learn at another. Sometimes this motivational chorus sounds loud enough for a conference full of aspiring sex salesmen; sometimes it sounds like the internal pep talk of a peon jollying herself through a long day at the office. “If you can get through something potentially unpleasant without letting it interfere with your peace of mind, that tells you something about yourself,” one lightning rod thinks about her job. “No matter what happens, nothing is going to drag you down. That’s an incredibly strong position to be in. You don’t get to that position by shrinking from a little unpleasantness.”

The most successful of the lightning rods maintain a brisk sense of efficiency about their duties. They are impervious to desire, but this appears to be an advantage: men’s needs must be appeased because men have needs to begin with. Rather than closing her eyes and thinking of England, a lightning rod puts on her P.V.C. leggings and reads Proust in the original French. She might realize, by gritting her teeth and giving an executive the whipping he demands, that she has the “killer instinct” it takes to be a litigator. She does not realize that she likes to whip.

“Normal men could be in an office full of women without finding an outlet,” Joe thinks as inspiration first strikes. “Unfortunately most women did not seem to have the same urges. Or if they did, they wouldn’t admit it. They probably didn’t, anyway. But if they did they wouldn’t admit it.” We see Joe make plenty of mistakes, but nothing ever suggests he is mistaken in this initial assumption. It’s hard to tell how exactly Ms. Dewitt intends the reader to receive such statements. On one hand, it would take a poor sport to get offended; on the other, it seems like the author has dodged solving the most interesting of the problems she created. It doesn’t take much interest in feminism to wonder how Joe would have reacted if some little go-getter had demanded a facility for lusty ladies. Or if she got a little too excited about anonymous boning.

Nicholson Baker’s latest novel, House of Holes, also courted controversy by imagining a special institution for the safe performance of sexual fantasies, a venue where desire could be openly enacted shame-free. Mr. Baker’s world, however, was populated with “delightful fuckers,” all of whom were miraculously compatible in their insatiability—women included. That, more than its explicit content, seemed adventurous. But then again, it didn’t leave anyone free for À la recherche du temps perdu.