Review by New York Times Review
IT is a brave author who embeds the rationale for writing his novel into the novel itself. But 70 pages into Joshua Ferris's first novel, set in a white-collar office, we meet Hank Neary, an advertising copywriter writing his first novel, set in a white-collar office. Ferris has the good sense to make Neary's earnest project seem slightly ridiculous. Neary describes his book as "small and angry." His co-workers tactfully suggest more appealing topics. He rejects them. "The fact that we spend most of our lives at work, that interests me," he says. "A small, angry book about work," his colleagues think. "There was a fun read on the beach." "Then We Came to the End," it turns out, is neither small nor angry, but expansive, great-hearted and acidly funny. It is set at the turn of the current century, when the implosion of the dot-com economy is claiming collateral victims down the fluorescent-paneled halls of a Chicago advertising firm. Clients are fleeing, projects are drying up and management is chucking human ballast from the listing corporate balloon. The layoffs come piecemeal, without warning and - in keeping with good, brutal, heinie-covering legal practice - with no rationale as to why any person was let go. In the midst of this crisis, the agency receives a pro bono assignment from a mysterious client, a breastcancer awareness group with no detectable presence on the Internet or elsewhere. The request is cruelly difficult: an ad that will make breast-cancer sufferers laugh about their disease. (The assignment becomes more fraught, and suspicious, when a rumor begins to circulate that Lynn Mason, the employees' reserved, arch supervisor, has breast cancer herself.) The staff members bitch about the campaign and mock it - and above all, work on it desperately, in hope of being the one to knock it out of the park. "We all had the same prayer: please let it be me." About that "we": Ferris writes the novel in the first-person plural - the snarky, gossipy, anxious employees of the agency compose the collective narrator. This exotic trick play of a device often made the narrative of Jeffrey Eugenides's "Virgin Suicides" feel anesthetized and distanced. But the collective voice is fitting for corporate employees, trained to work in teams, their groupthink honed in a million meetings, and the effect is chilling when the layoffs begin and the collective narrator is literally diminished. Ferris also sneaks in a fair amount of first-person singular. The novel is largely told through watercooler tales - Ferris's ad-people are big talkers, from nerves, boredom and professional training - and through them, "we" gradually refracts into individual voices. There is Karen Woo, senior art director, office gossip and font of specious intelligence, who, working on a campaign for a cookie for the health-conscious, inserts the boast that it has no "lastive acid," a dangerous substance that does not actually exist. ("I was trying to think out of the box," she explains.) There is Chris Yop, a desperate middle-aged copywriter who sneaks into the office to work on the breast-cancer project even after being fired. There is Joe Pope, Lynn Mason's lieutenant, resented by "us" for his antisocial distance. There is the single, pregnant, devoutly Catholic basket case; her married lover, praying she'll have an abortion, who regards her like a pinless grenade; and the grieving mother, taunted daily by a "Missing" ad for her daughter that the billboard owner has not gotten around to taking down months after the little girl was found murdered. Ferris, who once worked at a Chicago ad agency, is fluent in the language of white-collar wordsmiths under siege. His characters even concoct their own vocabulary for the layoff process. Being fired becomes "walking Spanish down the hall," a phrase with origins in pirate days borrowed from a Tom Waits song about an execution. Above all, Ferris has a sixth sense for paranoia. Information professionals crave information, and when it is denied them - who is going next, how many and why - they spin superstitious theories and adopt curious totems. The employees discover that the office coordinator keeps tabs on which furniture belongs in which offices, and they fear that their chairs - scavenged from laid-off peers with better furniture, in a round-robin so complex no one remembers whose Aeron was originally whose - will get them fired. The chair becomes a symbol for all that is hated and lusted-after about work. It is a prison and a status symbol, a reminder that "their" offices are not really their own, a means of exercising minor tyranny, a reward, a throne, a life preserver. The major story lines of "Then We Came to the End" hold few surprises. Like a make-work project, they are an excuse to get through the real joys of the day, which come from Ferris's small-bore observations. The Pavlovian magnetism of free bagels. The incredible sadness of a hard-boiled egg eaten at one's desk. And the prophylactic amnesia that separates time on the clock from the set of waking hours we call "our lives": "Half the time we couldn't remember three hours ago. Our memory in that place was not unlike that of goldfish. Goldfish who took a trip every night in a small clear bag of water and then returned in the morning to their bowl." LIKE the paper-pushers of the British and American versions of "The Office," Ferris's admen amuse themselves with tiny, absurd rebellions. A garrulous sad sack named Benny Shassburger decides to spend a day speaking in nothing but quotes from "The Godfather," on the theory that either no one will notice or they will be too polite to say so. When an associate asks for advice on a project, he replies, "This one time I'll let you ask me about my affairs." "Cool," his co-worker answers. Still, Ferris's novel is not the satire you might expect. From "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" to "Dilbert," the default position for American stories about business - especially as easy a target as advertising - has been derision. White-collar work is meant to be soul-killing and pernicious. It can be all those things, of course, and Ferris funnels that point of view through Tom Mota, a bitter, divorced desk jockey fond of guns, Emerson and e-mailing eloquent, profane and multiply cc'ed treatises on how sedentary office life goes against man's nature. (Here again, Ferris is smart enough to put his most persuasive rants in the mouth of a character who may well be dangerously crazy.) But work - even, or especially, useless work - can also offer purpose and meaning, as when Lynn Mason, dreading her impending surgery, drives to her office in the middle of the night and finds solace in the ridiculous pro bono assignment. "They have two weeks until presentation," she thinks. "It's insane to think she has even a moment to spare. She sits down at her desk. Here is a good place to be, right here, thinking." It is a ridiculous sentiment, counter to every carpe diem truism - who ever died wishing they had worked more hours? It is also perfectly understandable and beautifully expressed. Even after moving on and rebuilding their lives, the employees who exit Ferris's unnamed firm come to miss it, the drudgery, the infuriations, the hours spent with "this person or that who rankled and bugged and offended angels in heaven." And the reader will be able to empathize, coming to the end of this perceptive and darkly entertaining novel. "Then We Came to the End" would, it turns out, make a pretty good read on the beach. Particularly if you still have a job to vacation from. Management is chucking human ballast from the corporate balloon. James Poniewozik reviews television for Time magazine and writes its Culture Complex column.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Anyone who has ever logged time in a gray cubicle with cloth walls that wouldn't hold tacks will be astounded at the accuracy of this first-novel portrait of the workplace demimonde. Set in an unnamed advertising firm in Chicago, it grabs readers on the very first page like an executive assistant who can't wait to share the latest HR rumors. The firm is laying off employees, and as the quirky staff-cum-family alternately turns to and turns on one another, the reader plays eavesdropper to the unnamed narrator (who speaks in the first-person plural). He (or she) documents Benny's wild adventures with an inherited totem pole; the full catalog of Marcia's relentlessly eighties hairdos; Jim's lame but earnest ad pitches; Joe's inflexible professionalism; office leader Lynn's breast cancer; and the riotous yet painful mental breakdowns of not one but three pink-slipped workers. At their final gathering, the coworkers discover that their intimacy is a function only of proximity; no number of e-mails, lunches, or phone calls can substitute for the binding power of office walls. While the prose veers off into amusing tangents, like an associate trying to waste as much of an unproductive afternoon as possible, the author always returns to the story at hand. It's a 375-page, 3-martini-lunch of a novel, and you'll have it read by quitting time.--Mediatore Stover, Kaite Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this wildly funny debut from former ad man Ferris, a group of copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the end of the '90s boom. Indignation rises over the rightful owner of a particularly coveted chair ("We felt deceived"). Gonzo e-mailer Tom Mota quotes Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the midst of his tirades, desperately trying to retain a shred of integrity at a job that requires a ruthless attention to what will make people buy things. Jealousy toward the aloof and "inscrutable" middle manager Joe Pope spins out of control. Copywriter Chris Yop secretly returns to the office after he's laid off to prove his worth. Rumors that supervisor Lynn Mason has breast cancer inspire blood lust, remorse, compassion. Ferris has the downward-spiraling office down cold, and his use of the narrative "we" brilliantly conveys the collective fear, pettiness, idiocy and also humanity of high-level office drones as anxiety rises to a fever pitch. Only once does Ferris shift from the first person plural (for an extended fugue on Lynn's realization that she may be ill), and the perspective feels natural throughout. At once delightfully freakish and entirely credible, Ferris's cast makes a real impression. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A debut novel from an author whose short fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review, Best New American Voices 2005, and Prairie Schooner, this work depicts the offices and cubicles of a Chicago advertising agency located on the Magnificent Mile. The employees are quirky, neurotic, and self-involved, but the radical laws of the workplace force them together, and they rely on one another more than they care to admit. Through the anxiety and animosity of layoffs, missing chairs, and office pranks, their collective life story is always at the forefront of the narrative, evoking both great delight and emotional pain as we watch each character come to his or her own end. Ferris repeatedly pulls us in by capturing multiple conversations at once and methodically expanding the space between words with humorous, thoughtful insight to highlight details in those ordinary moments. Regardless of vocation, you know these people, and, what's worse, you see yourself in them. With so many books on office life, it's nice to see someone add fresh spark and originality to the subject. Nick Hornby praised this as "a terrific first novel," foreshadowing a positive public reception. Recommended for all public libraries.-Stephen Morrow, Columbus, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This debut novel about life in a Chicago advertising agency succeeds as both a wickedly incisive satire of office groupthink and a surprisingly moving meditation on mortality and the ties that band. Though Ferris only briefly invokes Catch-22, he transfers that novel's absurdist logic, insider's jargon and indelibly quirky characterizations to the business of brainstorming and creating advertising--or at least pretending to stay busy lest one be considered dispensable. After the breezy pacing of the opening chapters presents the cast as indiscriminately eccentric, the plot deepens and relationships become more complicated, with the individual eccentricities of the characters defining their humanity. During a downturn in business, people keep disappearing, either fired or dead. Fired is worse, especially for those who remain, because the fired often refuse to disappear. These coworkers know each other like no outsider can, yet generally have little idea what the lives of their fellow employees are like outside the cubicle. In fact, the novel rarely ventures beyond the cubicle and the conference room, making Ferris's ability to sustain narrative momentum all the more impressive. The narrator is an ingenious device, a nameless one who uses the third-person "we" to suggest that he (or she) might be any one of the office group. Yet since most or all within the office show that their perceptions are seriously skewed, the reader is never quite sure how much the narrator can be trusted. There's a crucial interlude, a chapter in which the "we" disappears, and a character who had seemed more like a caricature to those who work for her reveals her flesh-and-blood complexity and ultimately raises the novel to a higher literary level. The funhouse mirror here reflects the office dynamic at its most petty and profound. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
