Seth Marko, avid and discerning reader of books (so few of these left!) and author of The Book Catapult, was kind enough to give Culture Lust some love and wrote for us the following review of Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End.  Make sure to check out Seth's website and other book recommendations.  

Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. 

“Genevieve had blond hair, cobalt eyes, and a tall, gelid grace. Even the women admitted her superior beauty. On Christmas one year, she was given as a gag gift a set of twisted redneck teeth, which she was instructed to wear year round in an effort to even us all out. But when she put them on, we discovered – the men among us, that is – a desire for rotted teeth we never knew we had.”

About a year ago – several months before the March 2007 release date – I got my hands on an advance copy of Joshua Ferris’s debut novel, “Then We Came to the End”.  The book’s jacket described it as “wickedly funny” yet “bighearted.”   But I thought its workplace, cubicle setting seemed like a setup for a playful novelization of “The Office.”  Would this be something I could read 375 pages of and enjoy? The publisher then sent me one of those notepaper cubes for my desk, coated in post-it note yellow and festooned with the author’s name & book title. I realized then the book would stay in my field of view for a long time. (The pad of paper has like 10,000 sheets, those crafty marketing departments)  Nevertheless, I read only 50 pages, got distracted by something darker & grimmer, and sent Ferris back into my endless, Jenga pile of books. 

Then, in December 2007, the New York Times released their annual ten Best Books of the Year list – 5 fiction, 5 non-fiction. I met several people who purchased all ten books as gifts for friends – regardless of their friends’ taste or reading habits, but simply because the Times suggested them. That’s power you can’t mess with. Of course, Mr. Ferris’s book was on this year’s list – now I couldn’t possibly resist!

The majority of the book is narrated in a first person plural – unusual in a novel, and rather difficult to make readable and plausible. The We of the narration is the collective voice of the underlings in a Chicago-based advertising agency whose daily operations are powered by a frenetic hive mentality. The collective voice fits perfectly with corporate cubical life. Some are weak, some are strong, some are smart, some are not, but all function as one cohesive unit – or so the We would have you believe. When the We are assigned a mysterious pro bono account for a breast cancer awareness group, the We becomes convinced their boss, Lynn Mason, has cancer and has created this false account. There is absolutely no proof of this – all the speculation comes from interoffice mutterings and gossip – the all-powerful driving force in the We’s lives. But even when faced with a fake ad campaign, the We retain a sliver of workplace pride in doing a job well done.

Ferris’s playful narration interlaces dozens of anecdotal stories from the office – many stemming from the firing of a troublesome, unhappy, Fight Club-reject-type employee, Tom Mota. But Tom is just part of the We. Chain-smoking Brizz is fired, dies, and wills Benny Shasburger a 25-foot totem pole. Marcia Dwyer has bad hair and only listens to “bands we had outgrown in the eleventh grade”. Tom wears layers of the same company polo shirts every day and calls it expressing “company pride”. Anxious Chris Yop is convinced he will be fired because he has someone else’s office chair and bookshelves in his office – though he pronounces “bookshelves” as “buckshelves”. And Jim Jackers is always the last to know.

Midway through the book, Ferris changes gears, and voice, employing Lynn as his sole narrator. (Begin the “bighearted” section.) The humor and wit of the collective We is brought to a screeching halt, and the truth and reality of Lynn’s life comes to the fore. Gone are the hypothetical musings and ridiculous minor workplace transgressions – the humanity of the collective begins to shine through. As the firm begins laying off workers at an alarming rate, the bonds between those remaining grows ever tighter ( the We begin to obsessively guess who will be fired next – dubbed “walking Spanish”). The We are more than silly office anecdotes and expendable worker bees – at the core of every character is a human being with a history and a future and Ferris proves masterful at drawing these stories out. We begin to wonder who the We really are – is disgruntled Tom crazy and destined to return to murder everyone? Is Karen Woo really an ice queen or is there more to her than meets the eye? Did Chris steal someone’s chair?

The underlying theme seems to be there is always more to the people around us than we think, and the book more than lives up to its “bighearted” billing. So I guess there is some truth in advertising after all, and life is far more than the contents of your cubical.