A Flavour of the Book: “Billy Reiser came in
with a broken leg. At first everyone was excited. How did it happen? We
gathered around his office as soon as word spread, as if guided by a voice or a
high-pitched frequency. Talk was like the flu: if it started with one, soon it
infected all. But unlike the flu, we couldn’t afford to be left out if
something was going around. We wanted Billy to tell us how it happened.
“Softball,” he explained. That was it? “Bad slide,” he elaborated. We couldn’t
help feeling disappointed. We told Billy we hoped he felt better soon and left
again for our desks. A reason like that was hardly worth getting up for…”
The Authortrek View: This is an excellent
novel about a group of co-workers in a Chicago ad agency. “More Abandon”, the
Joshua Ferris story included in the anthology Best New
American Voices 2005, sounds very similar, as it involves an office
worker who stays in the office after hours, prying into his co-worker’s desks,
and there are similar pranks in Then We Came to The End. As you might guess from the title, much of
the novel is written in “the first-person plural”, which gives the effect of
having a collective narrator, since the people working at the ad agency have a
common voice. That is not to say that
everything is rosy and bright, and that there are no conflicts within the
team. There are also several
outstanding characters at the ad agency, such as Tom Mota and Joe Pope
(although he’s somewhat aloof from the rest of the team). Since the communal voice is not an
individual character, it helps that there is an excellent storyteller (Benny
Shassburger), and that there are also interesting stories about him, such as
his inheritance of a genuine Totem pole that holds his fascination, and his
unspoken love for his co-worker, Marcia Dwyer.
The setting in an ad agency is also helpful, as there is more than one
frustrated author working there – this
is, after all, how Joshua Ferris did his research. Although the communal voice is not an individual character, it
does progress and develop, as momentous events happen within the firm, most
noticeably the lay-offs following a downturn in business. The team is also not immune from death,
disease and tragedy. Doubtlessly the
movie will be on its way soon (with a screenplay written by Don
Blattner?). Joshua Ferris writes at the
end that the title of the novel was derived from Don DeLillo’s Americana,
but it has to be said that he is a much better writer than DeLillo, and that
has written one of the greatest American novels. The novel is also very witty and funny. Then We Came to the End is destined to become a classic,
as it will resonate with many readers for a long time to come, perhaps longer
than even Tom Mota’s beloved Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Read an extract from Then We Came
to the End on Amazon.com
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