True, funny and touching | Then We Came to the End: A Novel

Funny, fantastic, tragic book (and gorgeous dust jacket design!) | Then We Came to the End: A Novel | Joshua Ferris

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	• Then We Came to the End: A Novel Joshua Ferris Back Bay Books, 2008 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 218 reviews view larger image
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Funny, and a little bit of drama

I think the strongest points of this book are the humorous sections, and the weakest are the drama sections. This is not to say I didn't care about the characters and their sometimes sad, futile work situations. But, there are some stretches of this book that stretched a little too far and I fell my attention wander a bit. Good book, but not the best.

True, funny and touching

The unnamed narrator of this book kept me laughing and nodding my head for the whole ride as he took me through the final tumultuous weeks suffered by the anxiety-ridden employees of a Chicago advertising firm. Business is down and layoffs are on, and all of them are just clinging to the life-raft, praying they won't be next and agonizing over what they'll do if they are. For the most part it's a hysterically funny and usually unflattering inspection into each character, mixed in with more serious moments, from Tom and his unbearably verbose e-mails to Lynn's possible breast cancer (does she or doesn't she have it?) to Amber and Larry's sordid affair, to the tyrannical serial number system used to monitor the precise whereabouts of every single chair, bookcase and printer. It's a brilliant breakdown of why co-workers really ARE like family, in that you can love and hate them with equal passion several times over - just in the course of one day.

Like the movie Office Space - one of my all-time favorites - this might be one of those "you had to be there" kind of things, meaning that to fully appreciate it you may have to have worked in an office environment; i.e., the world of horrific coffee, unproductive meetings, cheap carpet, unreasonable deadlines, ergonomic chairs, romance rumors, post-it notes, and the inevitable waves of layoffs. Since that's been my world for far too long now it was as familiar to me as if I'd written it myself. It's dead-on and in some ways even made me appreciate the little sub-culture created around one's workplace, one you're often not really aware of as its own special little world until you're suddenly booted from it.

I enjoyed it and will probably re-read at some point.

Then We Came to the End was shortlisted for the 2007 National Book Award.

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Funny, fantastic, tragic book (and gorgeous dust jacket design!)

This is one of the best books I've read in years: really unique, funny, and sad. I was drawn to it initially because of the brilliant cover design - fantastic work by designer Jamie Keenan by the way, and too bad the paperback editions don't reuse the same design - and lucked out judging this great book by its cover.

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Adperson's anomie

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 on of the characters reads from the novel he has been writing about the others. It's complicated but it works.

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I Laughed, I Cried - Three Thoughts

Very rarely does a book inspire me to laugh out loud, much less gasp or start tearing up. This book did all of that (which led to some embarrassing moments on the train) and more. I read it several months ago and still think about it at least once a day - although I do work in an office in Chicago that is facing layoffs, so the parallels are undeniable. But I don't want to sell Ferris short - the book would be brilliant even if it didn't resonate with my real life.

The book's real triumph for me (and perhaps the reason some people are so put off by it) is that so much happens by inference, subtext, and implication. With the single (startling, unexpected, heartbreaking) exception, we never really get inside the perspective of the characters. We see their actions, listen to their words, hear their perspective from them, but their true inner life is the central mystery of the book, much as those we spend our time with are truly unknowable. So those moments when truth bubbles to the surface, when we discover something truly personal about a character, are like shocking twists in a suspense film.

When describing this book, I often say it's like Catch-22 in an office, which isn't really fair, but does get at some central things about the book. First off, the characters' unknowability, then the sheer size of the cast, and the time-jumping nature of the narrative, which goes forward and back and around and through the same central time period. But the thing that both books have at their center is a bruised but extremely loving and generous heart that cloaks itself in jokes and distance because the truth is simply too much to bear. I love this book.

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No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.
With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.

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