Joshua Ferris by Kelly Campbell.I just finished And Then We Came to the End, the debut novel by Joshua Ferris. The book is set in a Chicago-based advertising firm, where the employees work in teams of two, copywriters paired with art directors all wracking their coffee-saturated brains for tags and slogans for water, charity fundraisers, ink cartridges etc.
The novel is easy to read and flowing, great sentence structure and some wonderful insights. I read it all in one sittings, because the characters, although not delved deeply into, were absorbing, but more than the individual characters themselves, the camaraderie, the group dynamic. Great observations are the stresses of the speed of C21 life and capitalism in big city America. People said that this book was really funny, I didn't find it laugh out loud hysterical, a la Catch 22, which this book clearly takes a lot of inspiration from in its repetitive humour, but it was very enjoyable and sad and amusing all at once. A great debut work of fiction. I have also read one of Joshua Ferris' short stories which was published as part of a Short Story special edition of the Guardian's Weekend magazine. That too, was good. Incidentally, Then We Came to the End was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2007.
The above cover, post-it note coverage and Sharpie rended title is a great design I think and totally in-keeping (ink-keeping?!) with the theme and situation of the novel. I read the silver and orange edition however, which is a pretty good design itself.
Also, I should mention that this novel tries to do that annoying author-within-novel thing that Martin Amis attempts in Money. (Oh, how I loathe the vacuousness of that book). However, it is more successful here. It is much overdone as a literary technique though, a mon avis.
Overall it is an easy, enjoyable read, with touches of poignancy and melancholy mixed with wonderful wit and humour, versimilitudinal insight and a surreality and perculiarity which keeps the pages turning.
Some reviews of And Then We Came to the End:
It is a brave author who embeds the rationale for writing his novel into the novel itself. But 70 pages into Joshua Ferris’s first novel, set in a white-collar office, we meet Hank Neary, an advertising copywriter writing his first novel, set in a white-collar office. Ferris has the good sense to make Neary’s earnest project seem slightly ridiculous. Neary describes his book as “small and angry.” His co-workers tactfully suggest more appealing topics. He rejects them. “The fact that we spend most of our lives at work, that interests me,” he says. “A small, angry book about work,” his colleagues think. “There was a fun read on the beach.”
Then We Came to the End, it turns out, is neither small nor angry, but expansive, great-hearted and acidly funny. It is set at the turn of the current century, when the implosion of the dot-com economy is claiming collateral victims down the fluorescent-paneled halls of a Chicago advertising firm. Clients are fleeing, projects are drying up and management is chucking human ballast from the listing corporate balloon. The layoffs come piecemeal, without warning and — in keeping with good, brutal, heinie-covering legal practice — with no rationale as to why any person was let go.
In the midst of this crisis, the agency receives a pro bono assignment from a mysterious client, a breast-cancer awareness group with no detectable presence on the Internet or elsewhere. The request is cruelly difficult: an ad that will make breast-cancer sufferers laugh about their disease. (The assignment becomes more fraught, and suspicious, when a rumor begins to circulate that Lynn Mason, the employees’ reserved, arch supervisor, has breast cancer herself.) The staff members bitch about the campaign and mock it — and above all, work on it desperately, in hope of being the one to knock it out of the park. “We all had the same prayer: please let it be me.”
About that “we”: Ferris writes the novel in the first-person plural — the snarky, gossipy, anxious employees of the agency compose the collective narrator. This exotic trick play of a device often made the narrative of Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Virgin Suicides” feel anesthetized and distanced.
But the collective voice is fitting for corporate employees, trained to work in teams, their groupthink honed in a million meetings, and the effect is chilling when the layoffs begin and the collective narrator is literally diminished.
Ferris also sneaks in a fair amount of first-person singular. The novel is largely told through watercooler tales — Ferris’s ad-people are big talkers, from nerves, boredom and professional training — and through them, “we” gradually refracts into individual voices. There is Karen Woo, senior art director, office gossip and font of specious intelligence, who, working on a campaign for a cookie for the health-conscious, inserts the boast that it has no “lastive acid,” a dangerous substance that does not actually exist. (“I was trying to think out of the box,” she explains.) There is Chris Yop, a desperate middle-aged copywriter who sneaks into the office to work on the breast-cancer project even after being fired. There is Joe Pope, Lynn Mason’s lieutenant, resented by “us” for his antisocial distance. There is the single, pregnant, devoutly Catholic basket case; her married lover, praying she’ll have an abortion, who regards her like a pinless grenade; and the grieving mother, taunted daily by a “Missing” ad for her daughter that the billboard owner has not gotten around to taking down months after the little girl was found murdered.
Ferris, who once worked at a Chicago ad agency, is fluent in the language of white-collar wordsmiths under siege. His characters even concoct their own vocabulary for the layoff process. Being fired becomes “walking Spanish down the hall,” a phrase with origins in pirate days borrowed from a Tom Waits song about an execution.
Above all, Ferris has a sixth sense for paranoia. Information professionals crave information, and when it is denied them — who is going next, how many and why — they spin superstitious theories and adopt curious totems. The employees discover that the office coordinator keeps tabs on which furniture belongs in which offices, and they fear that their chairs — scavenged from laid-off peers with better furniture, in a round-robin so complex no one remembers whose Aeron was originally whose — will get them fired. The chair becomes a symbol for all that is hated and lusted-after about work. It is a prison and a status symbol, a reminder that “their” offices are not really their own, a means of exercising minor tyranny, a reward, a throne, a life preserver.
The major story lines of Then We Came to the End hold few surprises. Like a make-work project, they are an excuse to get through the real joys of the day, which come from Ferris’s small-bore observations. The Pavlovian magnetism of free bagels. The incredible sadness of a hard-boiled egg eaten at one’s desk. And the prophylactic amnesia that separates time on the clock from the set of waking hours we call “our lives”: “Half the time we couldn’t remember three hours ago. Our memory in that place was not unlike that of goldfish. Goldfish who took a trip every night in a small clear bag of water and then returned in the morning to their bowl.”
Like the paper-pushers of the British and American versions of “The Office,” Ferris’s admen amuse themselves with tiny, absurd rebellions. A garrulous sad sack named Benny Shassburger decides to spend a day speaking in nothing but quotes from “The Godfather,” on the theory that either no one will notice or they will be too polite to say so. When an associate asks for advice on a project, he replies, “This one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.” “Cool,” his co-worker answers.
Still, Ferris’s novel is not the satire you might expect. From “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” to “Dilbert,” the default position for American stories about business — especially as easy a target as advertising — has been derision. White-collar work is meant to be soul-killing and pernicious. It can be all those things, of course, and Ferris funnels that point of view through Tom Mota, a bitter, divorced desk jockey fond of guns, Emerson and e-mailing eloquent, profane and multiply cc’ed treatises on how sedentary office life goes against man’s nature. (Here again, Ferris is smart enough to put his most persuasive rants in the mouth of a character who may well be dangerously crazy.)
But work — even, or especially, useless work — can also offer purpose and meaning, as when Lynn Mason, dreading her impending surgery, drives to her office in the middle of the night and finds solace in the ridiculous pro bono assignment. “They have two weeks until presentation,” she thinks. “It’s insane to think she has even a moment to spare. She sits down at her desk. Here is a good place to be, right here, thinking.”
It is a ridiculous sentiment, counter to every carpe diem truism — who ever died wishing they had worked more hours? It is also perfectly understandable and beautifully expressed. Even after moving on and rebuilding their lives, the employees who exit Ferris’s unnamed firm come to miss it, the drudgery, the infuriations, the hours spent with “this person or that who rankled and bugged and offended angels in heaven.” And the reader will be able to empathize, coming to the end of this perceptive and darkly entertaining novel. “Then We Came to the End” would, it turns out, make a pretty good read on the beach. Particularly if you still have a job to vacation from.
by James Poniewozik, 18th March 2007
Set in a Chicago advertising agency, Ferris’s hugely enjoyable first novel delineates both the absurdities of office life, and the frustration, anger and despair simmering under the surface of his characters’ daily routines. Most of the workers appear to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and when the agency starts to struggle to attract clients and a series of layoffs begins, some of the staff are tipped over the edge. Ferris plays safe to start with: his description of the mundane activities of the working week (the meetings, the e-mails, the lunches) will be familiar (perhaps overly so) to anyone who has worked in an office. Yet his narrative soon veers off into a mix of the comic, the tragic and the surreal — a tricky combination that he pulls off superbly. Thus one character’s struggle with breast cancer sits side by side with another’s decision to spend a working day communicating only in quotations from the first two Godfather films. One character suffers divorce, another loses a child, while another inherits a totem pole. The book is only incidentally about advertising, although that industry does supply some of the book’s best jokes: when a relative of one of the staff discovers that copywriters and art directors call themselves “creatives”, he exclaims, “That’s the stupidest use of an English word I ever encountered.” Ferris has created a microcosm of modern capitalist society, and while much of his style and subject matter is a little too reminiscent of Douglas Coupland, this is an extremely impressive debut.Then We Came to the End, it turns out, is neither small nor angry, but expansive, great-hearted and acidly funny. It is set at the turn of the current century, when the implosion of the dot-com economy is claiming collateral victims down the fluorescent-paneled halls of a Chicago advertising firm. Clients are fleeing, projects are drying up and management is chucking human ballast from the listing corporate balloon. The layoffs come piecemeal, without warning and — in keeping with good, brutal, heinie-covering legal practice — with no rationale as to why any person was let go.
In the midst of this crisis, the agency receives a pro bono assignment from a mysterious client, a breast-cancer awareness group with no detectable presence on the Internet or elsewhere. The request is cruelly difficult: an ad that will make breast-cancer sufferers laugh about their disease. (The assignment becomes more fraught, and suspicious, when a rumor begins to circulate that Lynn Mason, the employees’ reserved, arch supervisor, has breast cancer herself.) The staff members bitch about the campaign and mock it — and above all, work on it desperately, in hope of being the one to knock it out of the park. “We all had the same prayer: please let it be me.”
About that “we”: Ferris writes the novel in the first-person plural — the snarky, gossipy, anxious employees of the agency compose the collective narrator. This exotic trick play of a device often made the narrative of Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Virgin Suicides” feel anesthetized and distanced.
But the collective voice is fitting for corporate employees, trained to work in teams, their groupthink honed in a million meetings, and the effect is chilling when the layoffs begin and the collective narrator is literally diminished.
Ferris also sneaks in a fair amount of first-person singular. The novel is largely told through watercooler tales — Ferris’s ad-people are big talkers, from nerves, boredom and professional training — and through them, “we” gradually refracts into individual voices. There is Karen Woo, senior art director, office gossip and font of specious intelligence, who, working on a campaign for a cookie for the health-conscious, inserts the boast that it has no “lastive acid,” a dangerous substance that does not actually exist. (“I was trying to think out of the box,” she explains.) There is Chris Yop, a desperate middle-aged copywriter who sneaks into the office to work on the breast-cancer project even after being fired. There is Joe Pope, Lynn Mason’s lieutenant, resented by “us” for his antisocial distance. There is the single, pregnant, devoutly Catholic basket case; her married lover, praying she’ll have an abortion, who regards her like a pinless grenade; and the grieving mother, taunted daily by a “Missing” ad for her daughter that the billboard owner has not gotten around to taking down months after the little girl was found murdered.
Ferris, who once worked at a Chicago ad agency, is fluent in the language of white-collar wordsmiths under siege. His characters even concoct their own vocabulary for the layoff process. Being fired becomes “walking Spanish down the hall,” a phrase with origins in pirate days borrowed from a Tom Waits song about an execution.
Above all, Ferris has a sixth sense for paranoia. Information professionals crave information, and when it is denied them — who is going next, how many and why — they spin superstitious theories and adopt curious totems. The employees discover that the office coordinator keeps tabs on which furniture belongs in which offices, and they fear that their chairs — scavenged from laid-off peers with better furniture, in a round-robin so complex no one remembers whose Aeron was originally whose — will get them fired. The chair becomes a symbol for all that is hated and lusted-after about work. It is a prison and a status symbol, a reminder that “their” offices are not really their own, a means of exercising minor tyranny, a reward, a throne, a life preserver.
The major story lines of Then We Came to the End hold few surprises. Like a make-work project, they are an excuse to get through the real joys of the day, which come from Ferris’s small-bore observations. The Pavlovian magnetism of free bagels. The incredible sadness of a hard-boiled egg eaten at one’s desk. And the prophylactic amnesia that separates time on the clock from the set of waking hours we call “our lives”: “Half the time we couldn’t remember three hours ago. Our memory in that place was not unlike that of goldfish. Goldfish who took a trip every night in a small clear bag of water and then returned in the morning to their bowl.”
Like the paper-pushers of the British and American versions of “The Office,” Ferris’s admen amuse themselves with tiny, absurd rebellions. A garrulous sad sack named Benny Shassburger decides to spend a day speaking in nothing but quotes from “The Godfather,” on the theory that either no one will notice or they will be too polite to say so. When an associate asks for advice on a project, he replies, “This one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.” “Cool,” his co-worker answers.
Still, Ferris’s novel is not the satire you might expect. From “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” to “Dilbert,” the default position for American stories about business — especially as easy a target as advertising — has been derision. White-collar work is meant to be soul-killing and pernicious. It can be all those things, of course, and Ferris funnels that point of view through Tom Mota, a bitter, divorced desk jockey fond of guns, Emerson and e-mailing eloquent, profane and multiply cc’ed treatises on how sedentary office life goes against man’s nature. (Here again, Ferris is smart enough to put his most persuasive rants in the mouth of a character who may well be dangerously crazy.)
But work — even, or especially, useless work — can also offer purpose and meaning, as when Lynn Mason, dreading her impending surgery, drives to her office in the middle of the night and finds solace in the ridiculous pro bono assignment. “They have two weeks until presentation,” she thinks. “It’s insane to think she has even a moment to spare. She sits down at her desk. Here is a good place to be, right here, thinking.”
It is a ridiculous sentiment, counter to every carpe diem truism — who ever died wishing they had worked more hours? It is also perfectly understandable and beautifully expressed. Even after moving on and rebuilding their lives, the employees who exit Ferris’s unnamed firm come to miss it, the drudgery, the infuriations, the hours spent with “this person or that who rankled and bugged and offended angels in heaven.” And the reader will be able to empathize, coming to the end of this perceptive and darkly entertaining novel. “Then We Came to the End” would, it turns out, make a pretty good read on the beach. Particularly if you still have a job to vacation from.
by James Poniewozik, 18th March 2007
by Ian Critchley, 27 January 2008
America, that country's favourite myth insists, was built by the individual: the 'calm, mature' man praised by de Tocqueville; Emerson's self-reliant 'true prince'. But in Joshua Ferris's debut novel of life and death in an ailing Chicago ad agency, times have changed. Rugged founding heroes give way to polo-shirted drones; horizons shrink to the fibreboard walls of an office cubicle; and, in an attention-grabbing display of virtuosity, the reassuring omniscient narrator is replaced by a stressed-out, first-person plural.
Ferris's 'we' is a fractious, hydra-headed array of copywriters and art directors, from upbeat networker Karen Woo to grizzled, reclusive Frank Brizzolera. Their days of extravagant anomie are shaped by a patchwork of kitchen gossip, emails and snippets that filter down from the office of their forbidding boss, Lynn Mason. 'We knew everything,' writes Ferris, and the collective provides a magisterial account of, for instance, doughy-faced Amber's pregnancy by a married associate. The comforting consensus is reinforced in endless, indistinguishable 'creative' meetings (three out of four of which, Ferris notes with dry precision, are redundant).
From the first page, the illusion of community is under attack. The dotcom bubble has burst and days of pushing each other around 'really fast' in a swivel chair give way to a round of layoffs that chips away at the very substance of the narrator. 'We hated not knowing,' the workers complain, denied any potentially actionable rationale for which of them might be next to 'walk Spanish down the hall'. And uncertainty drives an appropriately slight plot: as a rumour circulates that Lynn Mason has breast cancer, a mysterious client demands the besieged team produce ads to 'make cancer patients laugh'.
Recent American accounts of corporate life - Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, Mike Judge's 1999 comedy Office Space, the Dilbert cartoon strip - tend to the mordant. Then We Came to the End is funny, too. It is stomach-turningly accurate on everything from the unsteady 'particleboard wrapped in a cheap orange or beige fiber' between cubicles to the irrational rage that prompts otherwise decentish people to snap 'crip', 'gimp' and 'wobbler' behind an injured colleague's back. But the deadpanning - 'one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were universally reviled' - is misleading: Then We Came to the End is more tragedy than satire.
The tragedy, though, comes in appropriately small packages. Ferris is brilliant on the pathos of the 'useless shit' that surrounds his workers. In an attenuated world of modular desks and coffee stations, 'our mugs, our mouse pads, our desk clocks, our daily calendars, the contents of our desk drawers' take on a life of their own, alternately hoarded and despised as reminders of hundreds of lost days.
Swaths of the novel are devoted to a baroque theft and exchange of office chairs. Then We Came to the End is preoccupied by the treacherous non-durability of consumer durables. Beyond the revolving security doors lies grander-scale private suffering. But the novel reserves its greatest compassion for the disregarded sadnesses of the office. Roland, the impoverished, superannuated security guard, sits all day long 'at his lonely lobby post' or goes 'back and forth around the building on his aching feet'.
The dead Frank Brizzolera is reduced to 'a Styrofoam coffee cup on the floor under the desk, a cigarette butt curled at the bottom like a dead tequila worm'. The large writ absurdly small is the novel's favourite device, and the tension between them drives its best setpieces. The would-be climactic office massacre - unhinged ex-employee Tom Mota arrives dressed in a clown suit, bellowing Emerson quotations and waving a gun - dissolves in bathos when his bullets turn out to be paint pellets.
'We', or the bits of it that are left, are desperate to escape this poverty of scale. 'There had to be a better story than this one,' they muse, and the escapes that Ferris, a former adman, posits are literary and imaginative. Tom Mota, like a chino-clad Emma Bovary, clings to his romantic heroes, Emerson and Whitman. Don Blattner is working on a screenplay about 'a disaffected and cynical copywriter suffering ennui in the office setting while dreaming of becoming a famous screenwriter'.
Mentioned in passing is quiet Hank Neary, who dresses 'like an Oxford professor' and is working on 'a short, angry book about work'. Characteristically, he turns out to be the novel's heart. Five years later, a reading from his novel duplicates Then We Came to the End's only third-person chapter, an account of inscrutable Lynn Mason's last lonely evening before a mastectomy. Such salvation as there is, Ferris hints, comes from imaginative sympathy with the individual.
It's a neat-handed twist, but its tricksiness is unnecessary. Ferris's descriptions of the ordinary are so good - his workers spend their time lost 'inside long silent pauses as we bent over our desks' - they need no elaboration.
by Rachael Aspden, Sunday April 1st 2007
In Mike Judge's 1999 film Office Space, the main character, Peter, is called in by management to account for his time and prove that he is an efficient, productive, unlayoffable team member. Afflicted by an inability to lie, for reasons too involved to go into here, he gives it to them straight. "Well, I generally come in at least 15 minutes late ... and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual, work."
Peter, bless him, is just one in the serried ranks of fictional office slackers who have voiced the frustration, boredom and occasional bouts of homicidal rage that afflict their real-life counterparts. Tim in The Office, with his jellied staplers, is just the latest; his ancestry stretches back through Douglas Coupland's beleaguered serfs and Bret Easton Ellis's Patrick Bateman to the mother of all office novels, Dorothy L Sayers's Murder Must Advertise, a sparkling gem of a book. Set in a post-slump advertising agency and drawn from Sayers's own experience, it reveals how little has changed in 70 years of office drudgery: "Nothing pleased him better than to be interrupted in his encomiums of Sopo ('makes Monday, Fun-day!') or the Whoosh vacuum cleaner ('one Whoosh and it's clean!') by a fellow member of the department, fed up with advertising and spoiling for a chat."
Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris's excellent debut, follows in this fine tradition by devoting the vast majority of its 385 pages to people who are fed up with advertising and spoiling for a chat. And chat they do. From the start we are inducted into the office workers' gang, and we stand around and bitch with the best of them. "We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise," Ferris begins, promisingly. In fact, these people's whole lives lack promise. Layoffs are imminent at their Chicago ad agency, and everyone is shivering under the shadow of the axe. Work is scarce, yet it's more important than ever that everyone look busy. Long, cruel, funny anecdotes about each other (mostly told by the office gossip, Benny) are the only bright spot in the day.
If that all sounds a bit grim, it's worth pointing out that Ferris has created a hilarious collection of office gargoyles, in the great tradition of Ricky Gervais, Being John Malkovich and Matt Beaumont's cult novel about the ad industry, E. My favourite is Don Blattner, the film buff, who refers to Robert De Niro as "Bobby" and studies the weekend box-office takings like a hawk, shaking his head ruefully over Variety and murmuring: "The boys at Miramax are going to be awfully disappointed about this." In the claustrophobic confines of this office, such a man quickly progresses from mildly exasperating loon to ravening ball of agonising irritation - and we feel this more strongly than usual, since we're in the story. We are nothing less than a modern Greek chorus, standing by the coffee machine, hand on hip, going: No! Did she actually say that? Who the hell does he think he is? And so on.
It's a good trick, because it stops us from despising these wage slaves as much as we might. We are complicit in their judgmentalism. And their problems are the problems of any modern worker, in that they consider the acquisition of consumer goods and services ("A long weekend in Vegas. A low-end BMW") to be an inalienable right, and yet the person signing the paycheques controls access to that right. These people are infantilised, powerless. They look up to their boss, Lynn, with a mixture of awe and fear; in her ability to fire them at will, she is superhuman in their eyes.
About halfway through the book, Ferris adds a thoughtful, less cynical twist when he takes us out of the office and home with Lynn, who is also struggling. Her problems are much more serious; typically, though, as soon as we're back inside and chained to our desks, they fade in the shock of Marcia Dwyer's new haircut and the totally weird way Janine Gorjanc's been acting lately. But Lynn, with her quiet confidence, embodies and articulates the fear of the axe in a way her terror-stricken employees can only fumble at.
It's hard to work out, in the end, whether Ferris's novel is funny or sad. It's certainly absurd, and very entertaining. And, like Sayers's neglected masterpiece, it hums with the suppressed emotions of colleagues forced to interact professionally in an unnatural, stressful environment - anger, lust, envy, boredom, contempt, sometimes even love. If you work in an office, it may make you look forward to getting off work - maybe even for that long weekend in Vegas.
by Carrie O'Grady, Saturday May 5th, the Guardian
There is an aspiring writer in Joshua Ferris's novel about a Chicago advertising agency during the late-1990s economic slump. In office hours, he slopes down to the 59th floor - empty since the redundancies began - to write a "small, angry book about work", in which the boss is depicted as a tyrant because "anyone who believed in the merits of capitalism, and soul-destroying corporations, and work work work - all that - naturally that person wasn't deserving of any sympathy".
If the boss is a tyrant, then work is exploitative; if the boss is an idiot (think of David Brent in The Office), then work is meaningless. But what if the boss is a paragon of virtue? This is the scenario in Then We Came to the End, a first novel from America as impressively confident as Donna Tartt's The Secret History and as technically dazzling as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.
Set among the cubicles, watercoolers and "break-out rooms" most of us give our lives to, this big, kind book about work depicts a vanished world in which time is idled away by flicking paperclips at the ceiling and wandering down corridors clutching random sheets of paper. Bravely, Ferris writes in the first-person plural - "We had a meeting and when the meeting was over, we said thank you to the meeting makers for having made the meeting" - and, amazingly, he pulls it off, giving his ad-agency creatives the semblance both of an unthinking, irresponsible herd and a united, loyal team.
There's Chris Yop, who has been laid off but still comes to the office; Karen Woo, who is "like Hitler without the anti-Semitism"; and Amber Ludwig, who dislikes profanity but only since she became pregnant by Larry Novotny, who wants her to have an abortion before his wife finds out.
These people come together when their boss gives them the impossible assignment of designing a campaign to make a breast cancer patient laugh at her illness - which, they decide, is the closest their stoical boss will come to telling them she has breast cancer herself. They also come together to work on the flyers for their colleague Janine Gorjanc's missing daughter - scanning her photograph, manipulating it to play up her fair hair and freckles, and fixing her slightly crooked smile.
You see, these people are professionals. They are busy but they are also human, and they care. When Janine's daughter is found strangled in an empty parking lot, and her mother starts spending her lunch hours submerged in the ball pit at McDonald's, they notice, and they worry. But they also gossip about it by email, talk about it over coffee and go to gawp at her from a safe distance.
So these people can be bitchy and juvenile, too, which is great as it's very funny on the page. They play practical jokes, nick swivel chairs and spread daft rumours (the office coordinator, who has a "considerable mole" on her cheek, is said - for no obvious reason - to be able to carry several times her body weight, like an ant).
But the greatest joker of all is Tom Mota, resident non-conformist and all-round office crazy guy, the kind who wears three shirts on top of each other just to show them what an anarchist he is. When Tom is laid off, he returns to the office dressed as a clown and starts shooting everyone with, it turns out, paintballs - the most exciting and life-affirming thing to happen to these people since the first season of The Sopranos.
By the time Ferris comes to the end of this exceptional novel, the idea of work has completed a sophisticated journey: from adolescence (work as a source of infinite boredom) via adulthood (work as a necessary evil, what we do to pay the bills) to maturity (work as a satisfying and agreeable way to live). "The funny thing about work," writes Ferris, "is that it was so bearable." The funny thing about this book is that it seems so radical.
by Elena Seymenliyska, 12th April 2007
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