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Subscribe!Then We Came To The Envy
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
I recently read Joshua Ferris' much-hyped, National-Book-Award-nominated debut novel, Then We Came To The End. As a fellow first-novelist, it would be so easy for me to say it was overhyped, that he didn't deserve the cover of the New York Times Book Review, that he's yet another young Brooklynite writer, that blah blah blah. I even put off reading it for a while (bought it in hardcover months ago -- it's now out in paperback) just because I didn't want to face such feelings, or be filled with envy if the book did turn out to be That Good. Well, it is That Good.
In fact, I can happily report that Ferris' book is so good that I wasn't even envious, didn't feel bitter, didn't feel snarky -- just felt the Warm Fuzzy of literary joy to be reading something so funny, so entertaining, so emotionally right. I tip my cap to the man. I wish upon him even more praise, and even more sales.
For those of you who missed the hype, Then We Came To The End can be summarized (thinly, but not inaccurately) as the literary-novel equivalent of TV's The Office, but without that show's uncomfortable sense of sadomasochist voyeurism. It's set in a Chicago ad agency and takes place during the dot-com crash, dramatizing an impending series of layoffs, office affairs, cubicle shenanigans, and the other happenings that somehow keep us going from Monday through Friday. I laughed out loud, in public, several times while reading it; during an unexpectedly tense sequence late in the novel, I did that "cover-the-bottom-half-of-the-page-with-your-hand" thing so I wouldn't accidentally read the dramatic end of a chapter before I was supposed to.
And as a writer who did not go the MFA route, who has not been in the academic system for his writing apprenticeship, and who (I admit) has something of a chip on his shoulder about this, I was so pleased to read a book that dared to address Work. Work as setting, yes, but work as existential issue, work as identity, work both as unavoidable impediment to and intrinsic part of our happiness. So many writers (especially writers in my generation) don't seem to have much 9-to-5 experience, having shuttled from college to grad school to teaching appointments, and it was so refreshing to see someone write about a subject that, in my opinion, has been entirely overlooked in the canon, especially of late. Writers -- either because they're in school as students and then as teachers, or because they've been successful enough to write full-time or take piecemeal work as journalists -- are less likely than Normal Folks to have normal jobs, which explains the gap in the canon. I'm not saying teaching isn't a real job -- I am the son and brother of teachers -- I'm just saying, come on, there is no shortage of novels about professors, or journalists, or grad students. We need more books exploring the myriad enraging, perplexing, infatuating, annoying aspects of that thing that happens to us in our offices. The feeling of being trapped there, of yearning for more, of hoping that the Job can provide the very escape we so desperately seek, of wondering what happens when that escape hasn't come, whether it's the fault of the Job or (no!) some fault of our own. (And hopefully people will actually want to read such books, though sometimes I think publishers assume they won't, unless the characters' jobs are in publishing.) Thus ends my quasi-Marxist anti-academia plug/rant.
Seriously: Buy the book on your next coffee break, and start reading it on the one after that, and you'll thank me.
link to this | File: Book Reviews
In fact, I can happily report that Ferris' book is so good that I wasn't even envious, didn't feel bitter, didn't feel snarky -- just felt the Warm Fuzzy of literary joy to be reading something so funny, so entertaining, so emotionally right. I tip my cap to the man. I wish upon him even more praise, and even more sales.
For those of you who missed the hype, Then We Came To The End can be summarized (thinly, but not inaccurately) as the literary-novel equivalent of TV's The Office, but without that show's uncomfortable sense of sadomasochist voyeurism. It's set in a Chicago ad agency and takes place during the dot-com crash, dramatizing an impending series of layoffs, office affairs, cubicle shenanigans, and the other happenings that somehow keep us going from Monday through Friday. I laughed out loud, in public, several times while reading it; during an unexpectedly tense sequence late in the novel, I did that "cover-the-bottom-half-of-the-page-with-your-hand" thing so I wouldn't accidentally read the dramatic end of a chapter before I was supposed to.
And as a writer who did not go the MFA route, who has not been in the academic system for his writing apprenticeship, and who (I admit) has something of a chip on his shoulder about this, I was so pleased to read a book that dared to address Work. Work as setting, yes, but work as existential issue, work as identity, work both as unavoidable impediment to and intrinsic part of our happiness. So many writers (especially writers in my generation) don't seem to have much 9-to-5 experience, having shuttled from college to grad school to teaching appointments, and it was so refreshing to see someone write about a subject that, in my opinion, has been entirely overlooked in the canon, especially of late. Writers -- either because they're in school as students and then as teachers, or because they've been successful enough to write full-time or take piecemeal work as journalists -- are less likely than Normal Folks to have normal jobs, which explains the gap in the canon. I'm not saying teaching isn't a real job -- I am the son and brother of teachers -- I'm just saying, come on, there is no shortage of novels about professors, or journalists, or grad students. We need more books exploring the myriad enraging, perplexing, infatuating, annoying aspects of that thing that happens to us in our offices. The feeling of being trapped there, of yearning for more, of hoping that the Job can provide the very escape we so desperately seek, of wondering what happens when that escape hasn't come, whether it's the fault of the Job or (no!) some fault of our own. (And hopefully people will actually want to read such books, though sometimes I think publishers assume they won't, unless the characters' jobs are in publishing.) Thus ends my quasi-Marxist anti-academia plug/rant.
Seriously: Buy the book on your next coffee break, and start reading it on the one after that, and you'll thank me.
link to this | File: Book Reviews