Then We Came to the End: A Novel
by Joshua Ferris
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Book Reviews of Then We Came to the End: A Novel
Book Review: Living up to the hype
Summary: 5 Stars
I was intrigued by Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End when I read the NY Times review of it. However, I was a little wary of the first person plural conceit of the telling. Would it be too cutesy? Would it just be a novel whose sole highlight is the unusual point of view? Having read it, I can honestly say the book lives up to the hype. The story takes place in a Chicago ad agency during the summer of 2001. The "we" who narrates the story is everybody--the people in the office. You know them. You may be one of them. Many of us have been in workplaces where there was this collective sense of self, where people talked amongst themselves so frequently that you couldn't always remember where you heard a particular bit of news, you just knew it by osmosis, and where although you felt part of a large "we" that had no real secrets you still had no clue as to the inner lives of your co-workers. Honestly, the first person plural is the only way this book could have been written--it wouldn't have worked any other way. Ferris is enormously talented and lets this point of view work for him. Then We Came to the End is funny and true to life, and it has one of the most satisfying final lines of any novel in recent memory. I've been recommending it to everybody.
Book Review: They were the best of times, they were the worst of times
Summary: 5 Stars
Told from the perspective of "we", the narrator becomes you, and you become one of the many employees at a nameless ad agency in Chicago. It never got old for me, the usage of "we", and in fact this company was so similar to a company I once worked for in Chicago, that it honestly felt like it was my story (minus the really dramatic parts, of course). I've never read a book that so aptly described the corporate work place, the small moments of pleasure, the equal parts fondness and loathing you feel for your co-workers, the creative time-wasters, and the anxiety of wondering who's next to be let go. How will they react? Will they cry? Will they laugh it off? Will they come back? What will you do if it's you? Will you quietly leave with your box of things or will you tell them all to go to hell?
The details in this book are what I really love. The communal coffee, the knicknacks one hoards in one's cubicle, the quotes scrawled on Post-its, the coveted ergonomic chairs...it's fantastic. The good times, the bad times, it's all there. Bittersweet moments mixed in with truly heartbreaking ones, and dark humor holding it all together make this an entertaining book, perhaps not for everyone, but certainly for me.
Book Review: better in retrospect
Summary: 5 Stars
I came to the book after reading an excellent short story by Ferris
in the New Yorker ("The Dinner Party"). However, it took me a while
after I finished it to decide whether I liked this novel. The use of the first
person plural is different, but I don't think that is what makes the book really
unusual. Inconsequential stories of everyday office life are transformed into
prose that is in places poetic, and in others crass. The mundane nature
of the material he works with made me miss the careful construction of the
story, and the not so hidden subtext.
As other reviewers have noted, the novel really does come together
in the last 20 pages. However, even after I finished reading it, I kept thinking back
about the book - not the specific stories perhaps, but rather the
main ideas and feelings: how the existential fear of losing a job (and in most cases in
the novel, the character's identity along with it), is reflected in the mundane jokes and
worries over being found out with a stolen chair. In the end, I thought it
worked very well, but I can see how others may be disappointed.
Book Review: Adperson's anomie
Summary: 5 Stars
The clever and sophisticated people in this novel begin by acting in petty and childlike ways. They are a group of workers in an advertising agency in Chicago.. Augusten Burroughs's "Sellevision" and Scott Adam's Dilbert strip come to mind. The book is often mordantly funny, although it includes the murder of a child, a death from cancer, a death in military action, and bouts of depression and mental illness. These actions are effectively counterpointed with concerns about such matters as ownership of a chair or decorating an office cubicle.
As the story goes on the characters mature and come to respect each other. I had a vague feeling that there's a deep moral in there somewhere, if I was smart enough to understand it. It uses some narrative gimmicks of the kind I usually dislike, but which are used so effectively that I was drawn in. One schtick is to use the first person plural as a point of view. A large part of the story is told by "we" and not until the last sentence is the reader told who "we' is. Other parts are POV of separate characters, and then, towards the end one of the characters reads from the novel he has been writing about the others. It's complicated but it works.
Book Review: dark comedy
Summary: 4 Stars
I enjoyed this black comedy of cubicle life. The first part entranced me with its dry humor and spot-on depiction of the lives of corporate drones. The middle section was darker -- an more searching exploration of the psyche of those who confuse their work with their lives -- or more accurately have no lives. Then the jocular tone returns for the final section.
The author is very skillful in the way he gradually brings the various characters to life, although they do remain someone opaque. We get to know them in a similar way to the way we get to know our own work colleagues. We see their little tics and peculiarities but we only see part of them -- the work part. The rest remains unknowable to us.
This book has been compared to "Catch 22." I don't think it's quite up to that level, simply because the subject matter -- the folly of war versus the folly of office life -- can't be compared.
Having said this, this is a fun read -- a little sad, a little funny, a little disturbing.
For more on me and my book The Nazi Hunter: A Novel go to www.alanelsner.com