I’m still in the “I ought to read something challenging” phase after all the genre novels I read over the winter holidays. The most recent challenge was Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. As I read it, I was constantly reminded that what is funny to a critic might be irritating or just plain boring to a reader like me. This is not to say that Then We Came to the End is a bad book. It’s just not really my kind of book. I am definitely not a fan of literary fiction.
Then We Came to the End is an odd book, told in the first person plural (which I’ve never seen before), about the employees of a dying advertising agency in 2001. There’s no straightforward plot. Hell, there isn’t even a straightforward chronology. Rather, We (the collective narrator) will start thinking about an incident or an idea and start telling stories that focus on one or two or more of the employees. There is a certain amount of wacky humor to this book, and I did enjoy parts of it. But the longer I read, the more I got irritated at some of the character or at the stories because they were all blow out of proportion to their real-world importance (which was mostly nil if you weren’t one of the characters). Now, I realize that this is kind of the point of this book, but that doesn’t mean I have to enjoy it.
My interpretation of this book is that it was written to illustrate what cubicle life with the constant threat of layoffs can do to a person. There are an awful lot of warped people in this book. One, probably my favorite character, Tom Mota, decides to let everything he thinks come out in bizarre emails and pranks. He quotes a lot of Emerson and other notable quotables about how Man wasn’t supposed to live like this. This book has quite a lot in common with the movie Office Space on this subject and I do like how Ferris lets this idea come through.
It’s been an interesting experience reading this on top of watching Lost from the first season online. On the one hand, I have a group of people that are so removed from the day-to-day world that they’ve turned into neurotic poodles and cubicle mice (Max Brook’s term for this kind of white collar worker, which I love). And then, in Lost, there’s a group of people who’ve been knocked all the way down to the bottle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs*. Weirdly, the group on the desert island seems more well adjusted than Ferris’ characters. It makes me wonder if a certain amount of life and death struggle is good for the psyche.
Ferris is also entirely accurate about the tiny irritations in our coworkers that, when experienced for forty hours in a workweek, can absolutely drive you nuts. It’s the reason the term co-irkers was invented. But no one else understand when you trying to explain the irritation, because it always sounds petty when you try and explain why So-and-so is so aggravating. Of course, when you partly read for escape, reading this book is ironic. So yeah, work kind of followed me home this weekend. Then We Came to the End makes me very glad that I don’t really have any co-irkers right now.
Even though this is an oddly constructed book, I think it works, that it accomplishes what Ferris set out to. Because it’s narrated by a floating collective consciousness, it really captures the curios day to day life of an office. Ferris is spot on when he shows how rumors get started and grow and turn into what everyone knows and what everyone says. The only parts that rang false for me were a few sentences that didn’t sound American to me. Even though Ferris is American, there were quite a few things that sounded more like Britain than American to me. But that’s a minor quibble.
It’s hard to recommend this book because why would anyone want to experience more of the nine to five world than they absolutely have to? About the only people I would recommend it to are English professors who are looking for something that captures the modern zeitgeist and need some more required reading for their students. Unlike most books I read, which are really meant to entertain, this book was meant to be studied.
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* I suppose it is possible to say that Ferris’ characters haven’t really reached the top of the scale or that the scale isn’t a linear progression but really a sliding scale. Just bear in mind that I only took Psych 101 as a general education requirement and that a lot of my interpretation of the human psyche is based on having read a lot of books and participating in a lot of literary analysis.