Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End
The story, told almost entirely in the first-person plural, revolves around a bunch of employees in the creative area of a Chicago advertising firm that is slowly dying during the end of the dot-com bubble, with the group’s ranks diminishing by one or two with each round of layoffs. Lightening workloads mean more time for gossip, pranks, and the silly office games that seem to take place in every company that looks even a little bit like this. (The best gag in the book, about an office chair, reminded me of my favorite mousepad, one I bought through a site I’ll call F’dCompany, that reads: “you can have my aeron when you pry it off my cold dead ass.”) The first half of the book is frequently hilarious and offers a great blend of realism and absurdity – nothing in the book is impossible or even improbable, but everything is dialed up to be a little funnier or a little more ridiculous. The second half of the novel becomes more serious as one of the colleagues gets a serious medical diagnosis and a couple of the laid-off workers start to get a little weirder; although Ferris starts to give the reader a clichéd ending, it turns out to be a parody of the cliché rather than what would have been a colossal letdown in the plot.
The main problem I had with the novel is that right about at the halfway point, Ferris inserted a short story about the character who gets sick written in a different voice with a completely different tone. If I had to guess, I’d wager that Ferris had originally written this short story but found no outlet for it or was unable to expand it into a novel, so he inserted it into this novel and built the character into the novel’s story and made her subplot the primary plot of the novel’s second half. It has a disconnected feel similar to that of the end of Ender’s Game, where Orson Scott Card stuck a separate short story he’d written on to the end of what was otherwise a fun if somewhat simple sci-fi adventure/coming-of-age novel. That story and its integration felt forced, and the jarring shift in narration in Ferris’ novel was similar.
The other issue with the book is that there’s no central character with whom the reader is likely to connect – even the character in the short story isn’t terribly sympathetic, and we don’t get much insight into any other characters besides her. Ferris is working with an ensemble of interesting, quirky characters who are well defined but who by and large don’t develop and spend the entire novel at arm’s length from the reader.
Despite those two issues, Then We Came to the End is a funny and quick book that still manages to hit some serious themes, especially about work-life balance and how work has become life in different ways for many people in the workforce today.
Next up: The Magicians
I actually gave up on “The End” after the sickness bit in the middle of it. The narrator’s voice was really similar to that of the narrator of “Fight Club”, which isn’t necessarily bad but did make me have Ed Norton’s voice in my head the whole time.
Keith, watching you on my phone right now while I’m at work and I see you went with the sailboat background today. Very fetching.
Yes, well, Biff and Muffy talked me into it.
Can you comment further on what you decide is good character development? I have not read this novel, but it seems as though it is a theme for you when writing reviews. I often find this something I care little about (cognitively anyway) when reading and am curious how you would convey good vs bad character development.
Perhaps this is just a matter of understanding novels differently. You prefer a good crust and I prefer good toppings – in the end a good pizza is a good pizza and we can agree, even if we appreciate things differently.
I personally love the ending of Ender’s Game, but really just because it sets up Speaker for the Dead, which is my favorite of the series.
Character development should mirror real life: When a person goes through a major event or series of events, his/her character changes. The same should hold true in a good novel. Some characters will grow; others will regress or develop poor traits. The universe is open, but having a character unchanged through the events of a long or dense novel isn’t that realistic.
I think some people use the term “character development” to describe the author’s increasing revelations about the character as the novel goes on – the more you read, the more you know each character – but that’s not how I use theterm.
I read this too, and found the same disjointed feel to it. It was enjoyable, but it felt like some parts were bolted in from another book.
Re: Character Development
I think there is sometimes a realistic touch when characters don’t change, or at least don’t change in the unexpected way. I am generally turned off by novels in which the character development is too formulaic. I find too many novels (and movies and television shows, as well). Some people don’t change after going through major events; or take major turns for the worse. I struggle with “goody two-shoe” novels, where everything turns out right in the end and we are just waiting for the “bad” characters to have their epiphany and become good people. That’s not to say that I prefer static characters. There needs to be some sort of arc, some sort of path that the character is on. I just struggle when authors assume that character development inherently equates to the redemption of a character, when this is simply not the case.
Card actually only wrote ENDER’S GAME as an expansion of his 1978 short story so people would understand who Ender was and fully appreciate SPEAKER FOR THE DEAD. The fact that it became his career-defining book surprised him.
Thanks. Not to beat the horse, but in the Tom Joad novel, there was a criticism in the beginning about “thin characters.” What are thin characters? I guess I always figured a poorly described (is that the right word?) player in a story would be bad character development. But you use it to say the character developed as a human. Would you call an individual in a story who isn’t fleshed out very well thin?
I think this is a jargon issue at this point but this seems like a strange criticism.
hey keith – just saw the espn twitter/facebook/blog memo…will the dish continue?
I liked the novel, but I fear my tastes are a little too conventional for the narrative style employed by the author. I mean, I was annoyed by that section in the middle focusing on a certain character’s illness, but only because it meant that I was getting less of Tom. Keith mentioned that there weren’t really a lot of sympathetic characters in the novel, but I thought that of all the converging stories, Tom’s was the one voice I wanted to hear more of.
OT: Keith, why doesn’t all of this “suggested slotting” and pressure from the commissioner’s office violate collusion rules?
I thought this book was pretty electrifying, to be honest with you, in the way that only really terrific contemporary fiction can be. Just to sort of play devil’s advocate re: one point of yours–
“The other issue with the book is that there’s no central character with whom the reader is likely to connect”
Did you consider, maybe, that the lack of a central character is sort of part of the novel’s objective? I mean, that’s sort of an easy point to make, considering the first person plural perspective. But, just speaking about the emotional impact of the book, I found the initial lack of a central character to be terrific and totally appropriate to the book in an atmospheric sort of way. And the emergence of Benny at the end, in light of that lack of a central character, felt triumphant to me. And the dissection of the first person plural in the last sentence was ultimately devastating–all because we start out not knowing exactly who the lack of a central character is.
I also sort of appreciated it in the sense that it does for the reader what work and the real world, in my opinion, are supposed to do to people–teach them that the world doesn’t really need anyone, which is why entering the reality of the workplace can be so shattering for people who have always had all their egotism reinforced. I don’t know. Thoughts?