It's funny how certain books just come along at exactly the right time in your life. I read 'Franny & Zooey' when I was right out of college and just starting my life as a post-grad in the city, and it really spoke to me. I read 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' the summer before my senior year, when I was panicking about what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and it completely changed the way I looked at myself and the world around me. If I had read 'Then We Came to the End' 3 years ago, I wouldn't have understood or appreciated it as much as I do now, removed from the rat race just enough to still remember it vividly, but not so entrenched that I still harbor the same bitterness about that world.I worked at a corporate job for just over 2 years when I was fresh out of college, and I was completely miserable doing it. The long hours, the shitty treatment from people higher up the ladder than you, the gossiping and backstabbing...it's really no way to live. And yet, even though so many of us feel this way, we still trudge to our cubicles every day and put up with the same sad song and dance day in and day out, longing for the weekends and bemoaning how quickly they pass, all while doing nothing about it, even going so far as to scoff and be incredulous about the mere prospect of making a change. Joshua Ferris is a product of this world, but he's one of the lucky ones who found the strength to escape. His recognition of the corporate world is obvious when speaking about the universal feelings of the office worker, and his use of 1st person plural as a narrative device is the sort of gimmick that wouldn't work, or would be too precious or cute, in any other setting, but perfectly captures the tone for such an environment. By referring to each individual character in the novel on their own terms, but keeping the voice of the novel as 'we', Ferris is able to strike a perfect balance of connecting the reader to the larger picture and relating to his protagonists while also making each one feel like a real person with their own quirks and charms. Everyone knows a Benny Shassburger, the guy around the office everyone goes to to vent, or a Karen Woo, the ice queen who always seems to be right about everything. Yet the beauty of the narrative device is also connecting these individuals to the greater whole. It's easy to forget that these vibrant characters also feel the same quiet desperation as the rest of the group. It's a neat trick, and it works because a corporate office is the sort of place that fosters these common feelings among unique individuals who you never really know.And that brings me to one of the main themes of the book (at least in my opinion), the tenuous bond we have with the people we work with. In other words, the feeling that for all the time we spend with our co-workers, we'll never really know them in any tangible way, and that, vice versa, our co-workers will know us in a way completely different (or even contrary, to) the way those close to us in our personal life will know us. For example, the totem pole that Old Brizz left to Benny, or Tom Mota's affinity for Ralph Waldo Emerson, or even Lynn Mason's much rumored battle with cancer. There are simply things about us that we don't let others see, and this book reflects that perfectly.The end of the book was perfect as well. When you leave a workplace, you always think you'll be friends with these people forever. After all, these are the people who got you through the day, the ones whose jokes and good humor lifted your spirits when the rest of the corporate world attempted to assassinate your spirit. Then you leave, and maybe an e-mail or two is exchanged, or a drink is had after work before you completely lose touch, and, before long, you find yourself forgetting what people looked like, or unable to place the name of a person you saw every day for years. It's nobody's fault, per se; it's just what happens. People move on, they find new people to have drinks and make jokes with, different coworkers to gripe about, and new bosses to hate. This book shows that, but not in a bitter, resentful way. It just is, and Ferris acknowledges that, and the muted sadness contained in such realizations.The book was not without its flaws, of course. There were parts that could be conceived as a little preachy or pretentious, some elements that might seem a little too fantastic for the real world. But these are minor gripes, and overall, Ferris handles it all with subtlety and aplomb. 'Then We Came to the End' is a great book that avoids (and even acknowledges, via Hank Neary towards the end) the pitfalls that can easily accompany such a novel. Required reading for anyone who has ever endured corporate life.
I came upon this book on one of the book blogs I read after it was short-listed for the National Book Award. The reviews compared Joshua Ferris' debut novel in tone & content to "The Office," the best 30-minute network sitcom since Seinfeld and a current obsession of mine. So, Then We Came to the End sounded like it had good possibilities. And when I came to the end of it, I found myself having enjoyed it, despite some obvious flaws.I have to start by commenting on the first-person plural narration because it is something that is unique and identifiable about this book, and it's cleverly also embedded in the title of the story. I thought it was effective for the most part, especially in our initial tour of the office when we're trying to get to know all of the characters (and there are a LOT). What Ferris gets out of the "we" that a writer of lesser talents might neglect is real emotional content: "We were still alive,... The sun still shone in as we sat at our desks. Certain days it was enough just to look out at the clouds and at the tops of the buildings. We were buoyed by it, momentarily. It made us 'happy.' We could even turn uncommonly kind." Those kind of sentiments, even when they are surrounded by playfulness and absurdity and awful cynicism, they still worked for me. Ferris also shows great ability to craft characters. This is a novel largely built around the idea that corporate America at the dawn of the 21st century is hollow and absurd and that we want nothing more out of life than security and stasis. To that end, there are plenty of characters here who fit into that faceless corporation mold, and who only pop up to show how sad & unfeeling our society has become (the office coordinator, for example). But there is a heart to these people, and that is evident in characters like the deranged Tom Mota, the clueless Jim Jackers, the totem-pole worshipping Benny Shasburger and the always professional Joe Pope. I think the danger that Ferris faced in writing this novel was relying too much on stereotypes in the workplace, because there are weird people in every office, but there are enough REAL human people here to latch onto to carry you through the story. On the down side, the novel definitely loses its momentum in the second half. There are essentially two halves of the corporate tale, interupted by a 30-page interlude where we lose the first-person plural voice and we find an unexpected meditation on mortality and loneliness. That interlude was where the novel first surprised me, and I was excited that we might be headed somewhere far deeper and darker than I had expected. But the promise of that interlude was not realized in the second half. We return to the every-day and there comes a real heavy plot device that brings the story to a close, and there is an even more contrived device to bring all these characters together in a reunion. There is also a significant nod given to the events of 9/11, and how those events may have triggered a change in corporate culture, but it is only a nod, and it is not commented upon at all during the reunion post-script. All in all, it was worth the read. It was entertaining and well-written, and it had a heart to it, but it didn't have the guts to weigh in on every question it raised, or take the reader to a place of greater understanding or sympathy for these people, and in that, I thought there was an opportunity missed.
What do You think about Then We Came To The End (2007)?
Because so many of the GoodReads folks are participants or graduates of MFA programs, and because Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is so obviously the product of an MFA program, I thought to hedge and give this book three stars. But that would be dishonest.Truth is, but for 34 pages in the middle of this novel, I didn't enjoy Ferris's debut at all. Oh, it's witty and flippant and clever and occasionally funny, but ultimately it's not enjoyable.It fails for the reason so many MFA-workshopped novels fail: It's a technically proficient piece of writing about unserious folks discovering truths that serious persons generally know long before their 30th birthdays.Then We Came to the End begins like a sequel to the movie "Office Space", written by Chuck Palahniuk. It's written in the first-person plural, which is about the extent of its original contributions. We this, and we that. It's neither annoying nor enticing - but it seems to want to provoke commentary.On Page 2, we get this insight: "Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die."One of the great discoveries that happens in this novel, over the next 384 pages, is that persons do, as it turns out, die. At the very end of the novel - six years later - we learn that a number of the officemates in fact died. Why kill off these innocuous folks? Who knows? maybe to appear serious?But there's a piece of writing, an accomplishment of actual storytelling, that begins on Page 196 and treats the pathos of a person recently diagnosed with breast cancer. All the zaniness and shallowness of the novel's first half are temporarily forgotten while Ferris does an exceptionally good job of writing. From Page 196 to 230, this novel transcends itself and its pedigree. These 30 pages are the novel's best pages, and Ferris (or his editor) knows it.How do we know he knows it? Because after another 150 or so pages of cleverly describing office luncheons and chair-swapping capers and employee layoffs, Ferris comes back to it. He gives his least memorable character the task of reuniting all the unlikable folks from the office, six years after their end, for a reading of his novel.What excerpt is read? Part of the breast-cancer story from pages 196-230.On Then We Came to the End's back cover, an author named Jim Shepard writes, "The real revelation here is how moving it all becomes . . ." I disagree.
—Bart
I have too much of this book marked up to ever be able to catalog all the good parts here."What I'm trying to get at here is that I'M NOT SURE ANY OF US KNOWS just how far we have removed ourselves not only from nature but from the natural conditions of life that have prevaliled for centuries and have forced men to the extreme limits of their physical capacity in order simply to feed, clothe, and otherwise provide for their families, sending them every night to a sweet exhausted, restorative, unstirred, deserved sleep such as we will never know again."I really enjoyed this book. I admit that it took me until chapter two to realize that he was speaking in the collective "we" person. As if the people who worked in the office were not individuals, with individual lives, hopes, dreams, tragedies, and failures. But as if they were a collective unit--the mindless, emotionless, lifeless work force of this particular ad agency.We were lucky enough to get to know a few of them personally, and intimately. ("Carl Garbedian was in his midthirties. He had a gut like the male equivalent of a second trimester. He wore off-brand, too-tight jeans and generic tennis shoes, which, to us, conveyed the extent to which he'd given up.") ("Every day we had to wonder--who the hell was this Joe Pope, anyway? It wasn't that we had anything against him. It was just that he was maybe an inch shorter than he should have been.")They were just like many corporate Americans circa 2001. They were riding the wave of economic salad days--over paid, over-insured, under-worked. But one by one they were being knocked off, being "made redundant", "walking Spanish". Don't waste any more of your time reading this. (Unless you're at work--waste away. It would make Ferris proud). Just take from this that "Then We Came to the End" is darkly funny, tragic, deeply philosphical and well worth the wasted time.
—Alison
I LIKED:(1) How funny it was; (2) The first-person-plural voice, which could have backfired but didn't for me; (3) The guy who quotes Emerson (it was around here that I started to feel actual warmth for the characters, even when I couldn't keep them straight); (4) The Catch-22ishness (though it wasn't slavishly Catch-22esque, which you might initially think); (5) The very last line, which maybe could be considered gimmicky, but worked for me and which I read with what I guess I would call a "satisfyingly pleasant shock" (that almost never happens to me in a novel -- the last time it came close was Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity, where the last line suddenly made me remember the first line of the book (conveniently printed on the cover) and I went back to the first line to make sure I understood the implication of the last line, and I had, and wow, that got me, but then the rest of the book wasn't so consistently great, and so I'm not going to count that one);(6) The fun promotional website, which I wisely did not look at until after I read the book, not that it gives anything away, but because we all know what happens when you look at a debut novelist's fun promotional website and then read her stupid, sucky book. (N.B. A clever thing about the website is that only the characters that would have myspace pages do have myspace pages.) HOWEVER, I LIKED LESS SO, MAYBE, ALTHOUGH THESE WEREN'T THAT BIG A DEAL, I JUST CAN'T ENJOY ANYTHING WITHOUT QUALIFICATION ANYMORE, THE FACTS THAT:(1) It seems utterly implausible to me that a large percentage of a group of people in a cubefarm would (a) know and (b) embrace a Tom Waits song; (2) The "end" the title references, which (spoiler?) I take to mean "the end of August and first few weeks of September" thing toward the close of the book, which I read with unpleasant shock (it seemed like a calculatedly throwaway line, and I'm not ready for that to be a throw away line yet -- I felt the same way about DFW's "The Suffering Chanel", and I pretty much love DFW and will grant him all kinds of leeway); (3) I kind of lost track of some of the characters, which is part of the first-person-plural effect, although that's also a benefit of it and anyway I'm happy to blame myself for this(4) The resolution to the central maguffin ("Design a funny cancer awareness campaign") wasn't that great, but maybe the point was it couldn't be; but I was looking for it to be like The Cheese Monkeys, where the students get a design challenge and you get a chance to figure out what you would do and then you find out what the students did and you're all like, "Chip Kidd, you madman!"IN CONCLUSION HERE ARE TWO ANECDOTES(1) The book is set in and spends a lot of time dealing with the (great) city of Chicago and specifically an ad agency in Chicago, and a week or so ago I happened to spend pretty much a whole day in Austin with someone who works in an ad agency in Chicago (!), and I asked if he had read this book which I had assumed everyone in the world knew about, and if it had taken the Chicago ad agency community by storm and whatnot, and he said he had never heard of it. (2) From reading the book, you would think "this remarkable debut novelist must live in Chicago!" and when you finish the book and read the author description it says something like, "Ferris currently lives in Brooklyn" and I think that's probably the darkest joke in the whole book.
—Patrick
