Then We Came to the End: A Novel
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.
Amazon Best of the Month Spotlight Title, April 2007: It's 2001. The dot-com bubble has burst and rolling layoffs have hit an unnamed Chicago advertising firm sending employees into an escalating siege mentality as their numbers dwindle. As a parade of employees depart, bankers boxes filled with their personal effects, those left behind raid their fallen comrades' offices, sifting through the detritus for the errant desk lamp or Aeron chair. Written with confidence in the tricky-to-pull-off first-person plural, the collective fishbowl perspective of the "we" voice nails the dynamics of cubicle culture--the deadlines, the gossip, the elaborate pranks to break the boredom, the joy of discovering free food in the breakroom. Arch, achingly funny, and surprisingly heartfelt, it's a view of how your work becomes a symbiotic part of your life. A dysfunctional family of misfits forced together and fondly remembered as it falls apart. Praised as "the Catch-22 of the business world" and "The Office meets Kafka," I'm happy to report that Joshua Ferris's brilliant debut lives up to every ounce of pre-publication hype and instantly became one of my favorite books of the year. --Brad Thomas Parsons
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Then We Came to the End: A Novel Reviews
I certainly look forward to subsequent efforts by Ferris. But the last quarter (I know the fractions don't quite add up) flagged. But as dazzling as much of this book is, I thought it important to share my view that the author ultimately stumbled. And to say that it doesn't rise to the level of the masterpiece of the genre, Something Happened, is perhaps an unfair criticism. One of my all-time favorite books is Something Happened by Joseph Heller.Something Happened That book did a phenomenal job of exploiting the absurd/hilarious tragedy that life is. Joshua Ferris goes very far in capturing that world.
I have longed for another book that mined the same territory successfully. I appreciate how hard it is to maintain the manic energy that this sort of writing involves. But for those who were taken with this book, I strongly urge you to start with the Heller book. (Joseph Heller, after all, is fairly comparable to Kafka). The first two thirds of this book enthralled me.
I'm 200 pages into this and am utterly bored. Yes I work in an office and yes and I can relate to a lot of the office stuff (free food, long after noons, looking busy instead of finding more work to do when you just dont feel like working).but so what. The only reason I've gotten this far is that this is an easy read. The writing is uninteresting and not clever. One has cancer. The book jacket tells me Stephen King called this 'hilarious.' I'd like him to tell me what part is hilarious, because I havent found it yet. I fell for this due to Amazon's hype.
I'm going to throw this one out when I'm done with it instead of letting it waste space on my shelf. The story is boring. Jimmy cracked corn. The characters are names only - not people.
I suppose this novel was supposed to be funny, but I didn't get it.
A middle section, suddenly told from the point of view of Lynn Mason, a coldly competent executive who is terrified and alone as she faces cancer, was a sudden relief from the craziness.
The only human characters that appear are harassed; the employees don't do any work and seem to have no purpose, no families, no lives.
There's a reason the novel form is usually written in first person singular or from an omniscient narrator's point of viewwe need a viewpoint, a pair of eyes through which to view the world of the story.
The employees here are a bunch of talentless, juvenile, cruel people who care about no one and nothing.
Here there's nothing.
This is a tedious book about an advertising firm going down the tubes, and as I got to the end I felt it was a fate well-deserved.
The author's trick of writing in first person plural only added to my impatience.
The book isn't as funny as the jacket suggests, however it has a contemporary feel that slowly brings the characters to life. No two offices are the same, but this book rings true for anyone who has worked for a company about to go under. Critiques of the book accurately point out that it starts out at a slow pace, but after the first hundred pages you will find yourself drawn to the deep and relatable character profiles. I love how this book ends. Then We Came to the End captures the fear, culture and inside politics of the modern American workplace.
Ferris delves in to their work lives with intimate detail on their fears of being laid off, their attitudes towards each other, and how their personal lives affect their work lives. Each chapter could stand alone as its own story detailing the various going-ons in the office, such as the stealing of each other's desk chairs, the rumors surrounding their mysterious boss, and bizarre reactions from the laid off employees. Though many of the characters face depressing situations, the novel is very funny and witty, full of truth about workplaces- how coworkers tease and pull pranks on each other, workplace gossip, and office pariahs. A fantastic debut novel from Joshua Ferris about a Chicago marketing firm's employees. I breezed through this book, each chapter, though about the mundane and ordinary, seems full of excitement and hilarity. Easily the best book I have read in years.
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