Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris
Feb. 2nd, 2008 02:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
They spend their days - and too many of their nights - at work. Away from friends and family, they share a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers they call colleagues.
There's Chris Yop, who is clinging to his ergonomic chair; Lynn Mason, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about; Carl Garbedian, secretly taking someone else's medication; Marcia Dwyer, whose hair is stuck in the eighties; and Benny, who's just - well, just Benny. Amidst the boredom, redundancies, water-cooler moments, meetings, flirtations and pure rage, life is happening, to their great surprise, all around them.
Then We Came to the End is about sitting all morning next to someone you cross the road to avoid at lunch. It's the story of your life, and mine.
Written mainly in the first person plural, this is a novel about a group of people who only have the office and the fear of losing their job in common. Ferris has a wide cast of characters who drift in and out of the action (although the main storylines revolve around Chris Yop, Benny, Lynn Mason and Tom Mota) and at first I found it difficult to work out which character was which (although as I became absorbed by the action, it became less of a problem).
The first person plural device definitely made me feel included in their environment and this helped to reinforce the discomfort I think Ferris intends the reader to feel in scenes where you witness the casual cruelty of the protagonists (particularly in a scene where they queue up to watch Janine, a recently bereaved mother, sitting in a McDonalds ball pen). At the same time however, it also held me back from fully engaging with some of the characters because you do only meet them within this environment, which means that some (particularly Joe Pope who is really outside the group) are difficult to empathise with, even when they are victims of gossip and innuendo. In the interests of fairness though, I should mention that you see some characters going out of their way to be kind, particularly one scene that also involves Janine, where Tom Mota takes action to remove the 'missing' picture of her daughter, which she has to drive past on her way home from work.
Ferris only breaks out of the first person plural once, when he switches to third person to deal with the Lynn Mason part of the narrative. I found this segment to be particularly moving as Lynn battles her fear of cancer and her fear of having it treated whilst dealing with personal emotional issues. This is probably why I was so disappointed to find that Ferris includes a twist on this at the end, which made me feel that he'd robbed the book of its emotional core (although the twist does tie in with the notion that people in an office environment never really know each other).
There are some laugh out loud scenes in the book. My favourite was probably the storyline in which Benny inherits a totem pole from a fellow employee who was sacked (known in the book as "walking the Spanish"). His fellow workers discover that he's been paying a lot of money to have the pole stored and that he goes to visit it from time to time and begin to speculate about why he does so. I also thought that the storyline involving Chris Yop's obsession with his office chair was witty and well told, with a pay-off that made me chuckle.
The book is well written and confidently told. It is slow to build up steam, but I think that's more to do with the fact that Ferris is trying to make you part of the environment he's creating so you feel integrated into the story and to this end, I thought it worked well. Personally, I'd have preferred something that was a little more emotionally engaging, but this is still worth a look, not least because it's rare to find a writer willing to try a completely different approach to narration.
The Verdict:
Given that most authors seem to split between using third person limited and first person singular as their narrative voice, it is very heartening to see an author (particularly a first time author) try to break the mould by using first person plural. In the context of this book, and given the author's aims, I think it's something that works well and as such the book is worth a look on that basis. However, I suspect that the fact that you never really get emotionally close to these characters and you do see them display a herd-like casual cruelty at times may put some readers off. It's slow to build up steam, but once you do find yourself involved it's easy to follow and enjoyable.
They spend their days - and too many of their nights - at work. Away from friends and family, they share a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers they call colleagues.
There's Chris Yop, who is clinging to his ergonomic chair; Lynn Mason, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about; Carl Garbedian, secretly taking someone else's medication; Marcia Dwyer, whose hair is stuck in the eighties; and Benny, who's just - well, just Benny. Amidst the boredom, redundancies, water-cooler moments, meetings, flirtations and pure rage, life is happening, to their great surprise, all around them.
Then We Came to the End is about sitting all morning next to someone you cross the road to avoid at lunch. It's the story of your life, and mine.
Written mainly in the first person plural, this is a novel about a group of people who only have the office and the fear of losing their job in common. Ferris has a wide cast of characters who drift in and out of the action (although the main storylines revolve around Chris Yop, Benny, Lynn Mason and Tom Mota) and at first I found it difficult to work out which character was which (although as I became absorbed by the action, it became less of a problem).
The first person plural device definitely made me feel included in their environment and this helped to reinforce the discomfort I think Ferris intends the reader to feel in scenes where you witness the casual cruelty of the protagonists (particularly in a scene where they queue up to watch Janine, a recently bereaved mother, sitting in a McDonalds ball pen). At the same time however, it also held me back from fully engaging with some of the characters because you do only meet them within this environment, which means that some (particularly Joe Pope who is really outside the group) are difficult to empathise with, even when they are victims of gossip and innuendo. In the interests of fairness though, I should mention that you see some characters going out of their way to be kind, particularly one scene that also involves Janine, where Tom Mota takes action to remove the 'missing' picture of her daughter, which she has to drive past on her way home from work.
Ferris only breaks out of the first person plural once, when he switches to third person to deal with the Lynn Mason part of the narrative. I found this segment to be particularly moving as Lynn battles her fear of cancer and her fear of having it treated whilst dealing with personal emotional issues. This is probably why I was so disappointed to find that Ferris includes a twist on this at the end, which made me feel that he'd robbed the book of its emotional core (although the twist does tie in with the notion that people in an office environment never really know each other).
There are some laugh out loud scenes in the book. My favourite was probably the storyline in which Benny inherits a totem pole from a fellow employee who was sacked (known in the book as "walking the Spanish"). His fellow workers discover that he's been paying a lot of money to have the pole stored and that he goes to visit it from time to time and begin to speculate about why he does so. I also thought that the storyline involving Chris Yop's obsession with his office chair was witty and well told, with a pay-off that made me chuckle.
The book is well written and confidently told. It is slow to build up steam, but I think that's more to do with the fact that Ferris is trying to make you part of the environment he's creating so you feel integrated into the story and to this end, I thought it worked well. Personally, I'd have preferred something that was a little more emotionally engaging, but this is still worth a look, not least because it's rare to find a writer willing to try a completely different approach to narration.
The Verdict:
Given that most authors seem to split between using third person limited and first person singular as their narrative voice, it is very heartening to see an author (particularly a first time author) try to break the mould by using first person plural. In the context of this book, and given the author's aims, I think it's something that works well and as such the book is worth a look on that basis. However, I suspect that the fact that you never really get emotionally close to these characters and you do see them display a herd-like casual cruelty at times may put some readers off. It's slow to build up steam, but once you do find yourself involved it's easy to follow and enjoyable.
