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

Then We Came to the End: A Novel | Joshua Ferris | We can't stop thinking about this book.

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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 186 reviews view larger image
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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.

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SO damn good

Love the first-person plural. Love the microscope-eye view of office living, written with honesty and wit. Love the strong characterization, the whacky plot, the setting which by its very banality is sublime. The book is strongest when it's relating the way the office's boss spends the night before she's slated to go under the knife. So naked, so raw, so powerful, so true. I just love it!

We can't stop thinking about this book.

When we finished reading this terrifically funny debut novel, we thought about our co-workers at Metal Center News and McWilliams-Watermark and INS Advertising. We thought about the people's whose apartments we cleaned and the actors we acted with, and we wondered how they were doing right now and if they were happy and if they looked anything like what they looked like back then.

We laughed a whole lot in a "Catch-22" kind of way when we read this book and we were also surprised how serious and sentimental it was. But we also think that the publisher went a little too far with the bright yellow cover and the little cartoon characters. It's not a sitcom, we thought. It's literature!

One more thing, just between us: what's the last line mean, anyway?

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Fun, inconsistent 2007 novel on life at a failing ad agency

Joshua Ferris' acclaimed debut novel depicts a fading millennial Chicago advertising agency. The first-person narrator is an anonymous employee who seems to express the collective thoughts of the group while walking the reader around the office and sharing stories. Ferris populates this fictional agency with a richly drawn cast of employees. The accounts of office minutia are usually hilarious and realistic (one employee tries to pass an entire day without touching his computer keyboard) but occasionally neither (the tiresome discussion of office chair switches). The team faces the constant threat of layoffs (they call it "walking Spanish") during the post-Internet bubble advertising slump. Agency owner Lynn's struggle with breast cancer is a key theme of the novel. A segment of the book abruptly shifts from the office to a third person omniscient view of Lynn that, while dignified, disrupts the flow of this fictional work. This strong modern novel is recommended: I read this a few months ago and it still occasionally is in my thoughts.

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A Very "Male" Book

I liked this book. The first person plural was effective, not annoying, and disturbing in retrospect. The characters were real and yet not stereotypical. There were a few humorous parts. That said, I found this to be a very "male" book with little perspective of a woman's struggles in the workplace - even with Lyne's "interlude." Not that Ferris is under any obligation to tap into the female office psyche, of course. Just that I would have found the novel more enjoyable, I think. It was a bit dry. Some people already being driven insane by corporate culture might want to avoid it until they retire. Too close to home and all that.

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An interesting character study

Not your typical novel, Joshua Ferris' debut, "And Then We Came to an End," places the reader right in the middle of a group of somewhat wacky employees at a failing advertising industry. By narrating the story from the viewpoint of the first person "we" it's almost as if we're viewing things from the eyes of an anonymous co-worker, but we learn in the author's interview at the end of the book that he's using "we" in a collective sense. The book really consists of a number of vignettes describing scenes between co-workers who, like many of us, seem to have alot of time on their hands to avoid doing their jobs. The angst of employees at a failing company is well described, as are the travails of the various characters. The book is also quite funny at times (a bit reminiscent of "The Office"). Ferris makes an interesting choice by placing a chapter in the middle centered on the hard-working boss - Lynn Martin - and her denial of the disease she's suffering from.

A strong first effort, and an author I'm definitely going to follow. I'm interested in whether he tries to write a more conventional linear novel next.

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