Joshua Ferris: LibraryThing Author Interview

Joshua Ferris' new, just-released novel is The Unnamed. Like a wind-up toy, the main character's unknown medical condition will suddenly whisk him from wherever he is on a forced walk that ends only from exhaustion, miles from home. His family adjusts, as well as a family can, to an unexplainable disease. Joshua's previous novel, Then We Came to the End, was a 2007 National Book Award finalist.

At the moment, Ferris is writing an essay on the work of the Norwegian painter Lars Elling, and according to Joshua "contemplating about six ways to kill myself on account of it. I want to do both the painter & his work justice but fear I simply lack the lexicon."

The vast spectrum of rare diseases is a terror to behold. I'd send the curious to http://www.rarediseases.org but urge them not to spend too much time there. One walks away with the certainty that at least one of these suckers is going to do you in. Not cancer, not heart disease, not car accident, but the fatal chronic infection known as Q fever. Or the systematic atrophying of Shy-Drager disease. Or maybe you won't die. Maybe you'll just get Klüever-Bucy Syndrome, suffer damage to both temporal lobes, and find yourself sexually attracted to inappropriate objects. Or Morgellon's, where you'll have cutting, stinging and biting sensations believed to be fiber-like objects moving just below your skin. If you're prone to persuasion, it's the site for you.

Tim's disease is invented. In order to play around with the notions floating uncertainly through my head, I had to be free of the baggage of familiar diseases as well as the constrictions of known ones.

What gave you the idea for this story? How did it develop?

I wish I could reconstruct the moment. I remember thinking it was an idea adequate to the task of spending the days and days necessary to finding out whether or not the thing deserved the attention of months and years. I made a few chronological missteps in the beginning, starting in the wrong place and writing myself into narrative ghettos and dead ends, but at some point I figured out what needed figuring out, and from that point forward it was just a matter of puzzling out the pieces and putting in the time.

The mysterious disease could be replaced with any other long-term, serious illness, and still wreak havoc on the lives of his family. Did you draw on personal experience or observation to be able to write about the family dynamics surrounding the illness?

Not really. I mean, I know what it means to be someone's child, and I know what it means to be someone's husband, and recently I discovered what it means to be someone's father—with those emotional and intellectual foundations, the imagination has enough to work with. I'm not well suited to writing about personal experience.

The uncontrolled walking has some defining characteristics. Tim notices that he doesn't walk headlong into traffic, for instance. So it's a march that he has no control over, yet there are rules to it. It seems very much like the way anyone's life can feel—like they're being marched forward, not quite hitting the bottom of the barrel but also not feeling in control. If Tim didn't have this disease, would he have spent too much time at the office, and ended up with some degree of separation between himself and his family anyway?

I think distraction and inertia are where we spend most of our time. Self-awareness, awareness of mortality, awareness of others—awareness period is the most challenging existential mode. Tim is emblematic of avoidance. He spends too much time at the office at the expense of full consciousness. But when the condition returns, he can no longer avail himself of his chosen distractions, or rest comfortably in his constructed life. He wakes up, in other words. He's forced to confront the failures he could evade in the past, and to rely upon a family that he's taken for granted for too long.

Does having a book called The Unnamed present difficulties, to tout or search for, like an album called untitled? What made you choose the name?

I'm not sure if it presents difficulties. Perhaps it does. But it was The Unnamed from early on and I never considered another title.

The movie rights have already been optioned. Who could you see playing Tim, Jane, and Becka?

That's a fun question. Daniel Day-Lewis? Sean Penn? Your average Oscar winners. I think the world of Julianne Moore, she'd make a good Jane. As for who should play Becka, I don't know. Jonah Hill?

What are you working on next?

I'm writing another novel.

What are you reading now?

I was reading Crime and Punishment, now I'm rereading Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, and dipping into The Best European Fiction 2010.

Do you have a secret guilty pleasure book or genre?

I read mysteries & some crime fiction. Chandler, Cain, Hammett, Ross McDonald, James Crumley, Richard Price & George Pelecanos—these last two having the distinction of being alive, and woefully underserved by the genre labels they're ordinarily associated with.

What's on YOUR bookshelf?

Way too much to describe, so let me tell you exactly what's on my desk, which is where what I'm reading is always located: the abovementioned books, Swann's Way, Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, Kafka's collected stories, Beckett's trilogy, Montaigne's complete works, Stories by Chekhov, Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson; Basic Writings of Nietzsche, The Great Gatsby, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, and Jorge Luis Borges' Collected Fictions.

—interview by Sonya Green