No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment–the one we pretend is normal five days a week.
eMusic Review 0
01.30.09
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End
2009 | Label: Hachette Audio
Anyone who’s ever worked in an office will find plenty of fodder for giggling (and shuddering)
Joshua Ferris has a way with the mundane. He also has a way with grammar: the author’s zippy first novel, Then We Came to the End, is written in the first-person plural. As in, “We were fractious and overpaid,” which also happens to be the first sentence. The book’s anonymous “we” is the staff of an ad agency in downtown Chicago, a mixture of copywriters and art directors who perform elaborate pranks on their superiors, sniff for gossip like truffle pigs and get a bit of work done between bagels.
What kind of work, exactly? Picture the advertising milieu of “Mad Men” crossed with the bored shenanigans of “The Office.” One client, for example, demands an irreverent take on cold sore analgesics, a job the staff deems “one of those impossible, harebrained paradoxes that only a roundtable of corporate marketers smelling of competing aftershaves could have dreamed up.” Thanks in part to Deanna Hurst’s deadpan narration, the book gleams with such comic subtlety.
Company morale wilts when the economy tanks and layoffs begin. Work at the agency dwindles down to a single pro-bono project which may or may not be a hoax invented by the staff’s boss, who may or may not be dying. Suddenly, there are steeper things to worry about than toner stains and the crumb topping on a muffin.
Ferris’ novel is an epic of misdirected energies. The employees are curious, enthusiastic and ingenious at all the wrong things — curious about their coworkers’ private lives, enthusiastic about dismembering office property, ingenious at eavesdropping. “We had visceral, rich memories of dull interminable hours,” explains the narrator, somewhat wistfully. Anyone who’s ever worked in an office will find plenty of fodder for giggling (and shuddering) with recognition.
