Book #99

Then We Came to the End
by Joshua Ferris

Found this one at the Safeway book sale; the cover claims it is both hilarious and moving, brilliant and contemporary. I guess it is.

The book is set in an advertising firm in Chicago right around 2000-2001, and it starts off funny enough; the employees of the firm spend all of their time gossiping and talking about everything imaginable, and there are some excellent wacky moments -- good e-mails, good eccentricities, a fantastic story about stolen office chairs. The most interesting thing about the book from a writer's standpoint was the choice of narrator: it is in the first person plural throughout, except for one interlude in the middle when it goes to third person, but there is never a singular voice; the narrator is the group of office workers, whenever they gather, and it was interesting to hear the "we" talk about the different people who made up the "we" as separate entities -- all of them, at different times. I've never read a book that did that before, and it was well done and intriguing -- quite thought-provoking.

The story was less interesting to me. After the wackiness settles down, overwhelmed by the rather grim circumstances the characters find themselves in -- the firm is downsizing in the face of the growing recession after the dot-com bubble burst, and one by one, the employees are being laid off, or, as the author put it in my favorite single line from this book, they are each being "walked Spanish" down the hall, a pirate reference and an utterly beautiful phrase -- the book becomes, well, depressing. The central interlude is about a woman in serious denial about being diagnosed with breast cancer, and it is brutal; going back from that to the post-wacky office workers was a bit of a let down as they and their lives became unbearably shallow. They stayed that way until the end, when a last piece of particularly insane wackiness pushed the whole thing over the cliff, in my opinion. It was too ridiculous, too extreme, to be funny, and because it was, it made all the opening parts unfunny, as well, as they are just as sad and just as maddening, simply to a lesser extent.

I suppose, in retrospect, that that was the point; the characters are redeemed or not at the end by their respective ability to move on from the gossiping chattering group of nabobs that they were at the beginning. I suppose the problem is that I just didn't think about this book enough -- I should have pondered the characters' growth, and looked back at the beginning through the lens of the end.

But really -- who wants to work that hard on a casual reading book?