No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.
With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, ... (show more)
No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.
With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week. (show less)
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Every once in a while you read a book or see a movie that just parallels your life. I love the people I work with, they are by far the best aspect ... (show more)
Every once in a while you read a book or see a movie that just parallels your life. I love the people I work with, they are by far the best aspect of my job. Without them, I'm not quite sure where I would be in the workplace. It's the small conversations and the relationships at work that make it worthwhile. And that is the essence of this book, it's not the job, it's the people. And it's funny. Maybe more so for me being in the setting I'm in and working with people that remind me of the characters, but it does have humorous anecdotes that lighten the mood of lay offs. When I started reading this book it made me not hate my day to day work so much, cause other people were experiencing the same thing. But then the word came through at work that everyone would be laid off at the end of their contract (being freelance) and the book took on a whole new level of reality that I hoped it wouldn't. So, here's to our fallen comrades and those we will soon befriend in our new workplaces. May they never be as glorious as the ones we have now. (show less)
Let’s see. There is a story about a group of weird people in an office facing downsizing. I think I’ve run into this story. Oh, yes, I have—twice .... (show more)
Let’s see. There is a story about a group of weird people in an office facing downsizing. I think I’ve run into this story. Oh, yes, I have—twice . . . oops three times.
I bought Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End in March. I began reading it when it was nominated for a National Book Award. I normally do not say this, but: What were they thinking?
What I will do by way of plot is present it as my brain processed it. An unnamed narrator works for an ad agency at the end of the Dot Com bust when many co-workers are laid off; all of the main narrative takes place only in the office. That much is pretty simple. Beyond that . . .
There are characters named Joe, Lynn, Tom, Marcia, Amber, Larry, Brizz, Dave, Karen, Chris, and a few others. Each of these characters has one or more of the following traits or histories: interoffice affairs, interoffice crushes, divorces, separations, cancer, paranoia (loads of that), heavy smoking, death, deep personal loss, sexual ambiguity, failed screenwriting, failed novels; they also have strange habits that include eating the same thing every day, always wearing a Cubs hat, always being first to hear a rumor, taking pills from a co-worker; hatred of a wife whose job is “more meaningful.”
The problem is two fold: there is enough information to keep the characters separate, barely, and finally, who cares? I think even a well informed and well practiced reader of belle lettres might be vaguely interested in the narratology used in Then We Came to the End. Just past the middle of the novel, the narrative changes from the half-interested first person for most of the novel to the omniscient third person. The reason for why and its potential puzzle are not that difficult to sort out. Again, though, even those refined in the analysis of narrative will not puzzle long enough to get much out of the novel.
I hazard a guess that a decent portion of epiners work in offices. Each of the people above matched with one or more trait exist in your offices. I have an office whose population has more traits than those listed above and my office isn’t much larger than the one in the novel. To me, this is the novelist’s equivalent to the comedian’s airport jokes.
I cannot stand when a comedian has a routine that involves an airport, airplane, or literally anything at all that covers air travel at any time in history (flying carpets not excepted). I know they spend a large amount of time in airports and most of us can empathize, but to me this just speaks of a lack of material, imagination, or maybe just a sense of humor in the longer run. A novelist writing about life in an office while they work in an office . . . a total analog to me (I wrote a similar review of Adam Rapp’s The Year of Endless Sorrow—and Mr. Rapp is one of my favorite authors). Just because a story has been told before does not mean it cannot be told again in a different way. First, different ways do not always mean better and second, there isn’t really anything all that different in Then We Came to the End.
I will close this unusually short book review like this: my creative writing professor said you can write a book about boredom without it being boring. This novel is just another book about minor anxieties at an office, this one in Chicago. Change the city, change the names, you can even change the idiosyncrasies and it would still be just another book about a vaguely annoying office. (show less)
I'll admit, I was pretty skeptical of this book at first, (yes, I am guilty of judging books by their covers) but it came highly recommended by a respectable friend of mine so I figured I'd give it a chance. Upon completion, I wasn't sure if I liked the book yet strangely enough, I found myself recalling events from the novel many times to make sense of my own life. My first impression of the book is that it was quite odd, I wasn't expecting a satire when I first picked it up but that's essen... (show more)
I'll admit, I was pretty skeptical of this book at first, (yes, I am guilty of judging books by their covers) but it came highly recommended by a respectable friend of mine so I figured I'd give it a chance. Upon completion, I wasn't sure if I liked the book yet strangely enough, I found myself recalling events from the novel many times to make sense of my own life. My first impression of the book is that it was quite odd, I wasn't expecting a satire when I first picked it up but that's essentially what it is. Joshua Ferris depicts how sad our lives have become being cooped up in our 9-5 cubicle jobs. We perform meaningless duties as an attempt to contribute to our sense of self worth, and seek validation from our co workers and supervisors, whom we bad mouth out of spite or envy behind their backs. As jobs become scarce, competition becomes fierce and we work even harder to complete meaningless duties to avert being the next one to be let go. But at the end of the day, when it all comes to an end, will you be proud to be the last man standing, or will you have wished that you jumped ship earlier and pursued a more meaningful life? This book is subtle, witty, clever, and well written. Even the way the book jumps around from story to story, memory to memory, with no real timeline in sight, is a realistic representation of how we remember stories and make choices in our own lives. It is by no means a heart-racing thriller, nor will it tug at your heart strings and call for a box of kleenex, but it is an out-of-the-ordinary novel that deserves a chance. :) (show less)
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One of the best books I've read in a really long time. Maybe because I work in an office setting similar to this, I'm likely the target audience that relates to it. But this book is hilarious, and yet so spot-on in so many different ways. The whole book is written in first-person plural ("we" did this and "we" did that). And it's a really interesting way of writing that I dug. I find it hard to say WHY I liked this book so much, but I really did. The writing is spect... (show more)
One of the best books I've read in a really long time. Maybe because I work in an office setting similar to this, I'm likely the target audience that relates to it. But this book is hilarious, and yet so spot-on in so many different ways. The whole book is written in first-person plural ("we" did this and "we" did that). And it's a really interesting way of writing that I dug. I find it hard to say WHY I liked this book so much, but I really did. The writing is spectacular, the characters realistic, funny, and some were just like people I know and work with, and they felt real. Like, you actually cared about them and nobody was two-dimensional. Lynn is supposed to be the tyrant boss and that's part of her personality, but also, the more you learn about her, the more sympathetic of a character she becomes. They're all like that. I anxiously await the author's next book. (show less)
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