Review by New York Times Review
ASKED TO CREATE a list of brain-shatteringly dull topics for fiction, you might be tempted to include the following things that appear in Joshua Ferris's "To Rise Again at a Decent Hour": modern dentistry, pseudobiblical esoterica, the death rattle of a relationship, insomnia, shopping malls, other people's spiritual anomie, other people's use of social media, the perils of said social media, and baseball. (Baseball? I kid! I'm a good daughter of Cooperstown. And at least baseball is not as deathly as its near cousin, cricket. Cricket is also in this book.) What gives "To Rise Again at a Decent Hour" a fighting chance against the forces of tedium is that it's a Joshua Ferris book, and the author has proved his astonishing ability to spin gold from ordinary air. His debut novel, "Then We Came to the End" (2007), is a satire told in first-person plural about the office culture of an ad agency, a premise that seems iffy on the surface. The novel, however, is vibrant and hilarious and full of heart; it deserved every drop of the tsunami of praise that engulfed it on publication. His second novel, "The Unnamed" (2010), was received less ecstatically, mostly because it was very different from the first; it is about a man whose compulsion to walk is so debilitating and uncontrollable that his formerly comfortable life implodes. It is icy where the first book is warm, difficult where the first is easy, and terribly sad where the first is filled with romping joy. I like "The Unnamed" immensely for its clarity and for how viscerally the main character's anguished restlessness is reproduced in the reader. Still, anyone toggling between the two books would experience a sense of whiplash, and when "The Unnamed" was published it was as if the owner of an exuberant golden retriever puppy had shown up at the dog park with a pet ocelot. What kind of madman keeps an ocelot and a golden retriever in the same kennel? one wonders. What other marvels is he keeping there? Readers who admired both books also admire the author's range and ambition. Ferris's third novel falls somewhere between the voice-driven power of the first and the idea-driven metaphor of the second. The narrator is Paul O'Rourke, a Park Avenue dentist, Red Sox fan and serial enthusiast of short-lived pursuits, including the banjo, golf, women and secular Judaism. Most deeply, he's a functional orphan deeply scarred in childhood by his father's manic depression and eventual suicide. His longing for connection and fear of being hurt are so magnetically opposed he finds himself suspended between them, a middle-aged mostly loveless insomniac so depressed he's unable to act on his own behalf. He's a funny depressive, though, and there are marvelous moments in this book, particularly when Ferris gives us only the distant side of a conversation O'Rourke has with his super-Catholic dental hygienist, Mrs. Convoy, so we understand the ridiculous things he says only by implication. There's a set piece about a stool sample so funny that when it returned to me two weeks ago with my own hygienist's scaler in my mouth, she had to take a sighing cross-armed break until I stopped laughing. O'Rourke does not live without affection, but the affection resides entirely at work, where Mrs. Convoy worries about his smoking habit and where his kind ex-girlfriend is the receptionist. The dentist wishes to belong to a religious tradition and is fascinated by others' fascination with God, but is stymied by being an atheist himself. Suddenly into this midlife ossification some stranger drops a social-media cluster bomb. A website is made for the office, though O'Rourke did not want or authorize one. His fury slides to dread, then wonder when someone starts making bizarre claims about a lost biblical people called the Ulms (or Amalekites) in the name of Paul C. O'Rourke. According to a book called the Cantaveticles, which the impersonator quotes all over the Internet, the Ulms are a scattered group of descendants from a tribe practically wiped out by the Jews in the first recorded genocide. The Ulms' identity is not based on belief in God; rather, it is based on doubting God - and to watch as O'Rourke is slowly seduced out of his doubts about this group, whose sole philosophical flag is doubt, is one of the pleasures in a book filled with them. Yet O'Rourke is a true depressive; his longing is palpable, but he can barely rouse himself to act. Throughout the book, he mostly spins his obsessions before the reader over and over again, like a betta fish furiously stubbing its snout on the glass walls of the fishbowl whenever anybody moves in the room. This is clearly intentional, but it gives the narrative an airless, claustrophobic quality. The long summaries of ersatz biblical passages and the equally long narrations of Red Sox games serve to slow the book down even further. Near the end of the novel comes this passage: "Baseball is the slow creation of something beautiful. It is the almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental into an opera of bracing suspense. The game will threaten never to end, until suddenly it forces you to marvel at how it came to be where it is and to wonder at how far it might go. It's the drowsy metamorphosis of the dull into the indescribable." More than anything, this paragraph appears to be the kind of blueprint novelists sometimes slyly plant in their books to illuminate the project of the work at hand. It is valuable as a yardstick against which we might measure the book's achievements. "To Rise Again at a Decent Hour" is an "almost boringly paced accumulation of what seems slight or incidental"; in the middle I did feel threatened it would never end; there is a "drowsy metamorphosis" in Paul O'Rourke. If I never found the novel an "opera of bracing suspense," it may be because I was so worn down by O'Rourke's incessant circling around his self-hatred and fear and inability to make a substantive effort, that when change does in fact come to him, it feels a bit limp and clammy. If I were a different reader - a dental enthusiast, say, a Red Sox fan, a God seeker or an authority on alternate biblical history - each recurring obsession might have given me an electric jolt, and the book would have maintained momentum; the ending would have been a real revelation. Building a novel intended to dazzle out of the dullest raw material takes oversize moxie, but there remains a gap between the book's intent and its final effect. This has to do more with the circular structure of the book's concerns - Paul O'Rourke's glass fishbowl - than with any failure of skill in Joshua Ferris, who (doubt not!) remains as brave and adept as any writer out there. The dentist is fascinated by others' fascination with God, but is stymied as an atheist. LAUREN GROFF is the author, most recently, of the novel
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 5, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
Ferris returns with his third novel, another dark comedy in the vein of his well-received debut, Then We Came to the End (2007). Paul O'Rourke is a Manhattan dentist so disillusioned with the world that he doesn't even like it when his favorite baseball team wins the World Series. More than anything else, he dislikes religion, other people, and the modern technology that forces him to interact with other people. He calls cell phones me-machines and nicknames one of his patients Contacts for texting during a procedure. That's why he and his staff are shocked when a website for their practice suddenly appears online. Soon after, a Facebook page pops up, followed by a Twitter profile, all impersonating Paul. Infuriated, he tracks down his imposter and uncovers a fringe religious sect that worships Amalek, the father of a biblical tribe destroyed by King David in a holy war. As he tries to recover his stolen identity, Paul begins to question who he really is. The protagonist's sharp inner dialogues are laugh-out-loud hilarious, combining Woody Allen's New York nihilism with an Ivy League vocabulary. The narrative occasionally stumbles and spins out in the novel's latter third, but Ferris' unique voice shines.--Morgan, Adam Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Paul O'Rourke, the main character of Ferris's (Then We Came to the End) new book, is a dentist. And he's a good one, informed and informative-even if the mouths that once seemed so erotic have devolved into caves of bacteria, pain, and lurking death. Ferris depicts Paul's difficulties: in the workplace, he struggles to say good morning, has problems with the office manager (who's also his ex-girlfriend), and likewise has problems with the devout Catholic hygienist, who can't see why he doesn't believe. A constant ruminator and obsessive Red Sox fan, Paul would like to believe and belong, but he can't. And then the Ulms, who claim to be followers of Amalek (a figure from the Old Testament), hijack his Internet presence and claims him as their own. As an angry and incredulous Paul reads "his" tweets, learns about the unlikely history of the Ulms, and tries to figure out what it all means, readers may find themselves questioning whether the drama of the Ulms amounts to much. Paul is an appealing-albeit self-involved-everyman, but Ferris's effort to take on big topics (existential doubt, grief, identity, the Internet, the lure and limits of religion, and the struggle to floss in the face of life's meaninglessness) feels more like a set of thought experiments than an organic or character-driven story. Agent: Julie Barer, Barer Literary. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
