Book Report: Then We Came to the End

Then We Came to the End
By Joshua Ferris

This 'National Bestseller' grabbed my attention while I was shopping for a friend. With it's playful, blocky yellow words set against a red spine, I couldn't help but reach for it.

From the Back:
No one knows us in 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 Chicago ad agency Joshua Ferris depicts in his exuberantly acclaimed first novel is family at its best and worst, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells an emotionally true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.

I actually set this book back down. It was full price at a real bookstore, and I was supposed to be buying a gift. The blurb also struck me as somewhat vague... hinting of humor, but still vague.

Obviously, the next day I went back and shelled out fourteen bucks.

This book is... different. Firstly, this is the first time I've read a story set in the narrative 'we'. About 100 pages in, I realized that the main character is nameless, featureless, voiceless... a fly on the wall describing what goes on around him (him?). The narrative didn't bother me, so either I got used to it quickly or it was very well written--maybe the latter just a little more.

If you're looking for a book about characters, this is the Grand Daddy of them all. This monster of a book (385 pages) consists of very little actually happening in real time. I felt like I was part of this workplace, clustered in so-and-sos office, gossiping and speculating and creating rumors. The pack mentality is spot-on. The 'lens' with which you see this story darts back and forth through time and place, much in the essence of the newer, dry-humored sitcoms like 'The Office'. Much of what happens is told in story form by the characters themselves, which is often interrupted with questions from the other characters. Sounds confusing, and it is a bit, but it's meant to be take in stride and it works. We learn about the history of about half a dozen employees, each with unique personalities and relationships with each other. As the blurb says, this story is most certainly about a family--the sort of family that exists in every workplace. Every behavior is brought to light and rationalized, including the stuff we think nobody knows:

"We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy. We refilled our coffee mugs on floors we didn't belong to. Hank Neary was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat with a book taken from the library, copied all its pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at is desk reading what looked to passerby like the honest pages of business. He'd make it through a three-hundred page novel every two or three days."

Hee. Bloody Brilliant.

"We settled down to the fund-raiser ads. We opened a new Quark document, or took out our pencils. Every once in a while a nicely sharpened pencil would crack on the page upon impact and we'd have to go in search of the one electric pencil sharpener. That was annoying. Back in our chairs we drummed the eraser between our teeth. If a stray paper clip happened to be lying around we were likely to bend it out of shape. Some of us knew how to turn a misshapen paper clip into a projectile that could hit the ceiling. If our attention was drawn to the ceiling, we usually recounted our tiles. When we returned to our computer screens, we erased whatever false starts we found there, suddenly embarrassed by them."

Gee, sounds a lot like the life of a writer...

This book isn't all paranoia over bar coded chairs, and totem poles worth more than two cars. Lynn, the quiet, professional boss, has cancer. Rumor of it has spread and when she schedules a week off from work, the menagerie assumes it is for her operation and recovery. Why, then, does she show up at her office on the morning she should be getting a mastectomy?

The middle third of this book changes gears, and perspectives. We get a glimpse into Lynn's life, her discovery of the lump, her admitting her concern to her boyfriend, and the two of them confronting her innate fear of hospitals. The tone is bittersweet and solemn.

When time catches up to the morning Lynn skips her appointment, Ferris changes the POV back to the collective 'we' with none of the employees none the wiser. They continue to speculate about why Lynn is in the office, throwing out ideas until finally one of them confronts her. Lynn remains cryptic, and 'we' come to the wrong conclusion that Lynn never had cancer in the first place.

As the ad agency continues to go under, characters are lost. The rest of the story weaves together the remaining group's fear and struggles to come up with a pitch they think will save the company (and their lives): What is funny about breast cancer?

The characters drive the story, though, and I really enjoyed a narrative turn for the worse when a recently fired employee returns... dressed as a clown and packing a weapon, seeking revenge on those who wronged him.

Anyone who works with a regular group of people can appreciate this story.

"Tom Mota, ladies and gentlemen--martini addict, gonzo e-mailer, sometime wielder of an aluminum bat, great garden enthusiast, paintball terrorist, and our own in-house Emerson scholar. He had the annoying tic during his time with us of pinning aphorisms to the wall. We liked nothing less than people quoting at us from their corkboards. Hank Neary was the only one who could quote at us with impunity because he rarely made and sense, so we knew the quotation must add up somehow and we marveled at the obscurity. Quotations that tried to instruct us or rehabilitate our ways, like those Tom favored--we didn't like those quotations. We were especially put off by Tom's because it seemed a great irony that Tom Mota was trying to reveal to us a better way to live, when just look at the guy! What a fuckup. He quotations were never allowed to stay pinned up for very long. It would take him days to notice and then he would holler out into the hall, in his inimitable and eloquent manner, "Who the fuck's been stealing my quotes?"

My one complaint with this book is that I was unable to remember everyone. I couldn't make the connection between names and the people they were, until prompted. Ferris makes mention of this syndrome in the story, relating it to starting work at a new place and taking weeks to learn everyone--so I wonder if maybe he purposely did not work to connect the reader with each person but instead let their characters unfold.

I truly have never read a book like this, constructed in such a unique (and let's be honest, odd) way. The resolution takes place five years after the ad agency finally went under, and all the employees come together for a reading of Hank Neary's book, which turns out to be the story of Lynn and her battle with cancer--the exact words from when this story veered off into more mature matters. Interesting.

Many times I could relate, and it made me feel good to know that I'm not the only one who hates my coworkers, steals company time, or enjoys a good gossip session.

"The funny thing about work itself, it was so bearable. The dreariest task was perfectly bearable. It presented challenges to overcome, the distraction provided by a sense of urgency, and the satisfaction of a task's completion--on any given day, those things made work utterly, even harmoniously bearable. What we bitched about, what we couldn't let die, what drove us to distraction and consumed us with blind fury, was this person or that who rankled and bugged and offended angels in heaven, who wore their clothes all wrong and foisted upon us their insufferable features, who deserved from a just god nothing but scorn because they were insipid, unpoetic, mercilessly enduring, and lost to the grand gesture."

Definitely plenty of food for thought.

Four out of Five stars for sly humor, realism, originality and teaching us all a lesson.