Then We Came to the End

Bizarre, and enviable, how compelling a read this was for me without having any life experience in the book’s setting, an advertising agency in Chicago during the dot.com boom and subsequent bust.

I've thankfully avoided the drudgery of office life. Or is it so bad? That is one of the book’s most telling effects: making you reconsider work as not the ordinary Nine-to-Five purgatory of reports and files and meetings about meetings, but as a sort of well of humanity; or, to put it another way, a reservoir of human interaction, filled with hubris and humane acts, to be dipped into endlessly, for this is where we spend our time, and it is the “we” that makes work worth doing, not the work itself.

Correspondingly, the author (a very in-command debut novelist Joshua Ferris) writes from the first-person plural perspective, explaining in the very first line, “We were fractious and overpaid.” The technique offers something hard to reach using the standard “I” narrator or “he/she” perspective: a limited omniscience that is every bit as intimate as the most honest memoir. Here you get the same story from multiple eyes, whose re-tellings fill in the gaps that a singular voice may avoid altogether. Immediately you are among them, another “creative” (as those in the art department or copywriters are called) ambling over to the coffee bar to gush over the latest rumor mill grist. It’s involving, this forced inclusion, and in the hands of another, less able writer, almost certainly would come off cloying and overwrought. But Ferris, damn him: He pulls it off, aiming for the fences and knocking the ball clear over the vines at Wrigley. If you hear a plunk while reading, that’s the fruit of his ambition and talent finally landing somewhere in Lake Michigan.

Consider this exposition: [reveal spoiler][hide spoiler]  "Spring had finally arrived. 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 titles. When we returned to our computer screens, we erased whatever false starts we found there, suddenly embarrassed by them. We had the feeling that our bad ideas were probably worse than the bad ideas of others. Those of us who worked on sketch pads were engaged by that point in the great unsung pastime of American corporate life, the wadded paper toss. THis, more than anything, was what 'billable hour' implied."

Not a lot happens. But maybe that's the point. The reader becomes one of these worker drones, not necessarily "working" but getting paid to lose their focus time and again. Break a pencil, sharpen it. Find a paper clip, bend it. Stare at the ceiling; count the tiles; look back at your screen and realize all the work (what work?) you've done is garbage. Another hour goes by. Another client's bill goes up. Though I don't think Ferris was writing the Great Anti-Capitalism Novel, he points out the extreme inefficiency of the common office space model. But such passages are mere dabs of rubber cement on the diaroma of this book. The story shines when the "we" drones step out from the collective buzz and assert their individuality.

Like any office party worth its punch, the characters are the real show, and End has a surplus. Their names alone are worth the printing costs: Chris Yop, Jim Jackers, Frank "Brizz" Brizzolera, Amber Ludwig, Benny Shassburger. These and more inhabit the 60th floor of a high-rise off the Magnificent Mile; in a strange, small way, the interplay between characters and the subtle lunacy of what befalls each of them (plus the architectural commonalities of the setting) reminded me of a favorite young adult series, Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sacher. Though one is a National Book Award finalist and the other is a silly book for middle schoolers, each author has an ear for what’s right, regardless of the act’s implausibility or the dialogue’s seemingly inane qualities. And man, that dialogue: pay attention to the multiplicity of blurbs comparing this to Catch-22. Without putting Heller’s masterwork through the paper shredder, let me say that the inspired wordplay and circuitous banter in Ferris’ End approached that of Heller’s, and to me was ultimately more enjoyable, since the point was made and got on with, instead of Yossarian and his comrades' mobius strip of conversation, ad infinitum, until we’d laughed then chuckled then harrumphed then wondered feverishly when we’d find out what happened next. End has momentum. Even though plotlines weave and turn back on themselves (and stories are told by storytellers [who are telling someone else’s story]), the greater engine continues to chug away, propelling us onward to events inevitably riotous, surprisingly expected, and adverb-adjective again.

Others have said it better than I: This is a funny book about sad, lonely people. It asks us many questions, none more important than, How do you make someone laugh about the worst possible situation? Read this and find out.