Then We Came to the End: A Novel | Joshua Ferris | Good read for anyone that has worked in the...

Then We Came to the End: A Novel | Joshua Ferris | better in retrospect

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Then We Came to th...

	Then We Came to the End: A Novel Joshua Ferris Back Bay Books, 2008 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 217 reviews view larger image
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Good read for anyone that has worked in the corporate world

A good book for me is one that you won't forget. I won't forget this one. One of the characters tries to get through a day by quoting lines from The Godfather - that's laugh-out-loud funny. The mix of that level of humor with a topic as serious as cancer is very well done, as is the ending of the book. Anyone that has ever worked in the cube world will like it - you will recognize some of the characters as being like people you have known, only amplified a million times.

better in retrospect

I came to the book after reading an excellent short story by Ferris
in the New Yorker ("The Dinner Party"). However, it took me a while
after I finished it to decide whether I liked this novel. The use of the first
person plural is different, but I don't think that is what makes the book really
unusual. Inconsequential stories of everyday office life are transformed into
prose that is in places poetic, and in others crass. The mundane nature
of the material he works with made me miss the careful construction of the
story, and the not so hidden subtext.

As other reviewers have noted, the novel really does come together
in the last 20 pages. However, even after I finished reading it, I kept thinking back
about the book - not the specific stories perhaps, but rather the
main ideas and feelings: how the existential fear of losing a job (and in most cases in
the novel, the character's identity along with it), is reflected in the mundane jokes and
worries over being found out with a stolen chair. In the end, I thought it
worked very well, but I can see how others may be disappointed.

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superb

Finished this engrossing novel this afternoon. Still a little emotionally impaired by it. Still jangled by its compassion and humor. Still reeling with the author's powers of observation.
Add me to the ranks of confused-by-the-negative-reviews. I'm sorry, but this is a page-turner, folks. "Not get into it"? This layered story lays bare much, much more than office ennui. This is a novel about inner lives, dreams private and public, and how we, social animals all, connect and disconnect and sometimes connect again. People say the characters are thinly drawn? Dickens-esque in its characterization, I'd say. It's also very funny.

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