Book Review: Then We Came to the End
Even though they dabble in absurdity, Dilbert, “Office Space” and “The Office” have all achieved great success because, at their core, they use clever insights into office life as the building blocks for comedy.
This tradition translates to the literary world in Joshua Ferris‘s award-winning novel “Then We Came to the End.” The entertaining read, which won many honors after its 2007 release, outlines many familiar situations to those of us who have worked in cubes or fought to move into a coveted office.
We know Ferris’ characters – the co-worker who feels the need to interrupt any social gathering to bring the conversation back to work, the guy who people think might come in one day with a machine gun, the person who always finds out the latest gossip days after everyone else. Not only do we know these characters, we may be one of them.
But Ferris doesn’t present that as such a bad thing. By creating such realism in a familiar setting, he lets us see the personalities of the staff at the unnamed advertising agency as inevitable instead of tragic. This often happens with deft humor such as when the supposedly unhinged ex-employee returns to exact his revenge. Horror gives way to laughter very easily.
Amidst all this, Ferris uses a clever literary technique, telling almost the entire story in the first person plural. The narrator is “we” and “us” because readers have likely faced so many of the same themes in their life. Like Jay McInerney’s use of the second person in the ground-breaking “Bright Lights, Big City,” the technique does not come off as a gimmick because it fits the story so well.
David Cook
November 26, 2008Thanks for the tip, Shea. I don’t like your comma usage in the first sentence, however.:)
brian
November 26, 2008Argh! That’s what I get for blogging at 5 a.m. Damn insomnia.
Book Review: The Unnamed
June 2, 2010[…] his debut novel “Then We Came to the End,” Joshua Ferris took a clever look at an advertising agency in hard economic times. His […]