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
