Then We Came to the End (Joshua Ferris)
I love a challenge, and obviously so does Joshua Ferris, who wrote this entire novel from the “we” point of view. An argument for brilliance in and of itself if it’s pulled off well. Add to that “we,” however, the perfect environment for a cohesive perspective: an office of people, specifically an advertising firm battling the post-dot-com economic slump with the weapons of lay offs and cut backs.
“Some days felt longer than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never the weekends. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in the half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks felt like we worked ten straight days and hand one one day off. We could hardly complain. Time was being added to our lives. But then it wasn’t easy to rejoice, exactly, realizing that time just wasn’t moving fat enough. We had any number of clocks surrounding us, and every one of them at one time or another exhibited a lively sense of humor. We found ourselves wanting to hurry tiem along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody every dared articulate it. They just said, ‘Can you believe it’s only three-fifteen?’”
In addition to these darkly comic moments of perfectly understandable gloom, the book tackles the irresistibility of office gossip as well as it’s Schadenfreude (Jeez, I’ve always wanted to use that word!), our love/hate relationship with our jobs (we hate them until we have a chance of losing them) and how we spend more than 8 hours a day with people we will never really know. Yep, all those things and cancer, sexual trysts, office supply theft, antidepressants, mediocrity and success - or “so-called” success.
Is the book perfect? No. The “we” gets a little hard to carry at some points, and there are perhaps a few more pages that there needs to be to accomplish the same result. But I really, really liked this unique and experimental book. So much so that I now owe the local library $1.80 because I didn’t want to turn it in until I wrote this review (and I’m currently about 6 books behind on reviews. Freelance work is great, but drains your free time for sure). I hope to see more great books from this first time novelist.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hard cover
5 out of 5 Star Books, Fiction |