And Then We Came To The End

And Then We Came to the End
Author: Joshua Ferris 2007 389 pp
My rating 2*
Started December 19, Finished Dec 24

Hard for me to believe that e the New York Times named this one of the five best novels of the year. A study of new millennium, post 9/11 office life (though not necessarily office work) at a pay scale above that of the anti-productive drones of TV’s The Office, this novel offers much finely turned prose but little in the way of plot or three dimensional characters. The writing seems to deliberately evoke the unstinting irony of Catch-22 (“… everyone loved Benny which was why some of us hated his guts”) without emulating much of that classic’s pathos or hilarity. While most of Ferris’ book pointlessly smirked its way from one shallowly insightful apercu to the next, it did earn its to stars with a bravura first chapter that would have served the novel much better as a stylistically distinct prologue, rather than as a get-used-to-it prologue, a forma;ly clever narrative device that kept me guessing until literally the last sentence, but most of all, through a divergent centerpiece chapter detailing a character’s coming to grips with a cancer diagnosis that provided in spades the human dimension missing throughout the rest of the book.

Why is it so hard to write a decent novel about office work? I can’t remember one that really resonated with me, and those that I remember at all, Heller’s Something Happened, Max Barry’s Company, left me similarly empty feeling. (I remember among the Heller obituaries of a couple of years ago, one that championed Something Happened as the neglected classic of the genre, so perhaps it’s due for a reread.) And then We …epitomizes the following basic flaw of the genre with its sense that white collar work consists primarily of coffee breaks, goldbricking, gossip and golden age angst; the depictions of office work as portrayed in print, on film, over the airwaves or across a wire would lead their audiences to believe that virtually no meaningful work gets done, let alone that such work might be challenging, engaging and even meaningful to those engaged in it.