Back in June at BEA, I had a meeting with Reagan Arthur, an editor at Little, Brown who was an early supporter of the Litblog Co-op. (She's also a MOTEV fan, which always counts extra around here.) I asked her what she was particularly excited about and she handed me one book - Joshua Ferris' novel Then We Came To The End. This one, she told me enthusiastically. I love this book, she said. And so it went into my bag - along with about 30 other BEA titles. When I got home it went from suitcase to bookshelf, and there it sat until December.
In the intervening months, I picked up the book a number of times and thumbed through it. But I was stopped by a pair of prejudices. The author has an MFA from UC Irvine, and we all know how I feel about that. And the setting - office cubicle life - didn't exactly whisper to me.
But I trusted Reagan's taste, so I hung on to the book and kept returning it to the shelves. Those shelves finally reached critical mass here in November and, even though I purchased another book case, it was time to purge. I began pulling off books for donation, making my peace with the fact that I would never read them. And I came once more across Then We Came to the End. Which nearly came to its end in my outgoing pile.
I couldn't do it, and so I sat down and decided, "I am going to read the first twenty-five pages of this and then, only then, if I don't like, it's gone."
A hundred pages later I was still sitting there. I kept reading, kept worrying that the promise wouldn't be fulfilled. But I finished the book in three or four sittings. And although one book might not be enough to prompt me to completely reevalute my stance on MFAs, it's a book that's taught me the importance of keeping an open mind. Because I would have missed one of my favorite books of the year.
It's set at a Chicago advertising agency at the beginning of the economic downturn. Jobs are being lost and much time is consumed trying to determine how to look busy enough to stay employed. It's a modest landscape but Ferris imbues it with such humanity that it's continually moving in surprising ways. I've been put off the "workplace" genre by the snarky condescension of The Office and Max Barry's Company, but Ferris has respect and affection for his characters.
Stylistically, Ferris works from an interestingly indeterminate point of view. A weirdly shifting first person plural that at first risks being a distancing device but ends up somehow underscoring the universal nature of this workplace experience that anyone who's spent time in an office will recognize. And hovering over the whole thing is Ferris' powerful theme of uncertainty. Jobs aren't all that are on the line; lives are held in the balance, too.
This isn't a formal review, and I'm still working out all of my thoughts about this fine book. But it occured to the me that the best thing I could do for you would be to allow you to read some of it for yourself. So, with the kind permission of Little Brown, I am reprinting here for your holiday reading pleasure our first-ever TEV novel excerpt, the entire first chapter of Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End. He's a lovely writer who has written a humane and affecting book and I hope you'll like what you see here. (The excerpt continues after the jump.)
You Don't Know
What’s in My Heart
WE WERE FRACTIOUS AND overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.
Ordinarily jobs came in and we completed them in a timely and professional manner. Sometimes fuckups did occur. Printing errors, transposed numbers.Our business was advertising and details were important. If the third number after the second hyphen in a client's toll-free number was a six instead of an eight, and if it went to print like that, and showed up in Time magazine, no one reading the ad could call now and order today. No matter they could go to the website, we still had to eat the price of the ad. Is this boring you yet? It bored us every day.Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die.
Lynn Mason was dying. She was a partner in the agency. Dying? It was uncertain. She was in her early forties. Breast cancer. No one could identify exactly how everyone had come to know this fact.Was it a fact? Some people called it rumor. But in fact there was no such thing as rumor. There was fact, and there was what did not come up in conversation. Breast cancer was controllable if caught in the early stages but Lynn may have waited too long. The news of Lynn brought Frank Brizzolera to mind.
We recalled looking at Frank and thinking he had six months, tops. Old Brizz, we called him. He smoked like a fiend. He stood outside the building in the most inclement weather, absorbing Old Golds in nothing but a sweater vest. Then and only then, he looked indomitable.When he returned inside, nicotine stink preceded him as he walked down the hall, where it lingered long after he entered his office. He began to cough, and from our own offices we heard the working-up of solidified lung
