The UnnamedA Novel

Another brilliant tale of liminal unease from Joshua Ferris — this time, about the Man Who Could Not Stop Walking
Tim Farnsworth is good-looking and well-situated at a ritzy Manhattan law firm. He has a lovely house with copper pots, a slim wife who is kind and loving, and a teenage daughter who causes only a manageable number of problems.

But he also has a condition. How to describe the condition? Tim is a compulsive walker. He walks, involuntarily, until his legs give out and a temporary amnesia sets in. “That was the helplessness, this was the terror,” he thinks at the onset of an episode. “The brakes are gone, the steering wheel has locked, I am at the mercy of this wayward machine.” The machine is Tim’s psyche, or his legs, or something, at any rate, which the doctors have yet to figure out.

The Unnamed is a departure from the gallows humor of Ferris’s debut, Then We Came to the End. Both, however, are thoughtful and yearning novels, instantly recognizable as the works of a major literary talent. Ferris has a way of describing liminal states with total (and artful) precision: the feeling of waking from a bad dream, the drift away from one’s spouse, the distress of undergoing menopause, even. Storytelling comes naturally to Ferris, but the author’s greatest accomplishment is to invoke in writing what thoughts we have trouble articulating to ourselves.