Then We Came to the End

Ramblings ahoy!

(Amazon)
(official website)
(Powell's interview)
(some reviews)
(in which Joshua Ferris makes traffic to this very site go, well, crazy)

True confession time: I read all the reviews, and I went in ready to hate this book.

I like a good office farce or parody, see: Office Space, The Office in all its permutations, Dilbert. But I really think that sort of thing falters more easily when it goes to long form, see: The Company, The Futurist. (Of course, now that I've said it aloud, I've thought of an exception -- James Hynes' Kings of Infinite Space.) When I cracked this book open, knowing that it was about an nameless advertising agency in the throes of dotcom-disaster-domino-effect, I was skeptical.

And everyone, including good ol' Nick Hornby right there on the front cover, said Then We Came to the End was funny. Funny, funny, funny, even a "darkly funny" or two. (What isn't darkly funny in America at this point?)

As I read, I came to the conclusion that calling the novel funny would be like someone asking me "What was it like working for a basically rudderless dotcom for five years?" and me replying "Oh, it was really funny."  Of course, there were funny things. But I'd also tell you about the sad things, the scary things, the stupid things, the boring things, and the strange things. And Joshua Ferris does, too.

The first half of the book is told in first person plural. Reading that ahead of reading the book also made me cringe at the thought of impending twee. But Ferris makes it work very well. He provides excellent reasoning for the choice in the Powell's interview linked above. But even without knowing that, the end result of the novel's voice is a corporate terrarium -- a world independent of all else, utterly dependent on itself, in which denizens can be plucked away at any time. I told a friend (who also worked at the rudderless dotcom, not coincidentally) that it reads exactly as if you're sitting in someone's cube and shooting the shit for hours on end. "Which is what we did," he replied. "Duh."

Don't worry, though, there's a plot. And the book report theme is this: What happens when something that's become your world suddenly isn't? That's not always funny, you know. It happens again and again in Then We Came to the End, in wildly different ways -- some of which I saw coming, some of which I didn't. The book ends with a reunion -- though the terrarium has expelled all of its inhabitants, all have moved on...and you realize that the setting which was so vivid and so important to the beginning of the book isn't anything more than a memory at the end.

I don't think of Then We Came to the End as a book about an office. I think of it as a book about a very specific time and place in American corporate culture. Employees were encouraged to be casual, friendly, brilliant, incestuous, antagonistic, open-hearted, trusting and then, well, the end came, sometimes overnight. We (there's that first person plural twee!) can almost go back to the way things were before the coffee bar, but not quite. Not ever.

A book that was simply "funny" wouldn't have made me think about any of that.