I've never watched either version of The Office. I have worked a generic cubicle job during a downsizing. I bought this before most of the reviews came out. Put all that together, and I was very satisfied with the book.

I found the characters and their antics perfectly credible. They were a bit more extreme than in my own workplace, but still in the same family, and you (I) want a novel to be an enhanced (over-saturated?) version of real life anyway.

The first person plural worked well; it was like someone coming home and telling you about their day. Of course, it's when most people don't have anyone at home that their work and personal lives can mesh so unhealthily. Again, familiar and realistic.

I certainly wouldn't want to work with those people. I wouldn't want to work in the corporate environment again in general. And maybe that helped me enjoy it -- knowing I'd recently escaped that world. ( )

Not funny. Why do book reviewers think anything featuring office cubicles is automatically humorous? ( )

This is probably the first book I’ve ever read that uses the first-person plural voice, and it works, primarily because of the last line, but also because of the theme. This is a story about a shared experience: working in an office at a pointless job in modern America. Most of us can relate. There are several parts in the book that are laugh-out-loud funny. The main thing that I think mars the novel and keeps it from being really good is an overlong middle passage, regarding the boss’s battle with cancer, in which point of view is broken. Also, the wrap-up ending-aside from the great last line-is a little too neat and obvious. Overall, this is a moderately fun read that I wish had lived up to my expectations a little better.This is probably the first book I’ve ever read that uses the first-person plural voice, and it works, primarily because of the last line, but also because of the theme. This is a story about a shared experience: working in an office at a pointless job in modern America. Most of us can relate. There are several parts in the book that are laugh-out-loud funny. The main thing that I think mars the novel and keeps it from being really good is an overlong middle passage, regarding the boss’s battle with cancer, in which point of view is broken. Also, the wrap-up ending-aside from the great last line-is a little too neat and obvious. Overall, this is a moderately fun read that I wish had lived up to my expectations a little better. ( )

Not really a review, but a book that starts like this....

"We were fractious an overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who
smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen."

is a pretty good way to start a book, unless your personal view of modern life is
considerably more rosy than mine. ( )

I kept thinking about the tv program The Office while I was reading this daffy portrayal of office workers, with their secret loves and ghastly secrets. Really enjoyed its hilarity and heart. ( )

The book has moments of humor. All of the character were one dimensional which represents what a person would see in a work environment. However if you never worked in an office environment most of the humor will be lost on you. ( )

There are different kinds of superficiality. When a book is said to be “relentlessly superficial,” it may be that it keeps promising depths that it does not deliver. This book is more “dependably superficial,” because we are told, by the book's style and voice, that it will not be plumbing any depths. A reader knows what kind of entertainment it offers.

At the same time this is not entirely fluff, because it has a very curious and original narrative voice: the narrator speaks using the first-person plural, representing himself as a group of office workers. “We gathered around Joe’s desk, waiting to hear what he would say”--that kind of locution structures the entire book, producing an interesting ambiguity. On the one hand, in most cases the “we” is an indeterminate number of office co-workers, so it is seldom entirely clear how many people are in the room in any given scene. On the other hand, there are times when “we” means the single narrator, who is not named, together with other people who think along the same lines and share the same gossip, so that the number of people in the room might be clear, but the number of people who know what happened in the room is unclear.

The vacillation between the experience of just one person and the collective office clique is consistently slightly unstable, and that, for me, produces the book’s only interest. There is one moment early on in the book when someone asks the narrator, “Who is this ‘we’ you’re talking about?” And it becomes suddenly clear that it is just the narrator, who has instigated an office intrigue under cover of the first-person plural. At that point the book could have dived into difficult issues of identity, as in “Atmospheric Disturbances” and many other such novels going back to Robbe-Grillet; but Joshua Ferris isn’t interested in those possibilities as much as he is interested in comedy that bobs just beneath the surface, never going too deep and never completely surfacing. ( )

Very funny and entertaining read about office life. I enjoyed this , but I think its not everybody's cup of tea ( )

Given my enjoyment of ad agency settings (Mad Men, Murder Must Advertise etc) as well as cube-lit, this should be a winner.

I did enjoy it: the petty workplace habits are well-observed and there was a rather neat device for the ‘lit’ part of the ‘cube-lit’ tag. The novel is told in first person plural (’we’*), which serves to make the reader complicit in the vile gang of characters’ activities.

Full review at the ( )

This is one of those novels that, after you've read it, you'll wish you were reading again for the first time. The whole experience with the characters is joyful, even when you're touched and teary-eyed. ( )

I couldn't put down the first half of the book, right up until the conversation entered Lynn Mason's head. Once the narrative switched from the "we" to the "I," it became far less interesting. Even when it switched back to the underlings, it was as if a thread had been pulled and the storyline unraveled. The characters had become unlikeable and, worse, boring by repetition. By the denouement, I was scarcely interested in a single character and finished solely on willpower.

I'd love to have given this book 2.5 stars--averaging the top marks for the first half and bottom marks for the second half. But since I must use whole stars, I generously rounded up. ( )

I wanted to love this book. I was totally rooting for this book. But I ended up abandining it on the El when I was half-way through reading it because it was kind of depressing. And not in an "all-my-relatives-died-in-a-plane-crash" way. In a whiny way. ( )

Unlike a lot of members here, I loved this book. It's been compared to Catch-22 and the Office before, and I think those are very apt descriptions. Funny, but quietly so, and real. ( )

This book is hilarious. I was literally laughing out loud while reading it. ( )

In fairness, this book is more of a 2 1/2 star, but given the tyrannical nature of the star system I am forced to go with a 2. Typically, this is the type of book I like--sarcastic, cynical, and funny. I really enjoyed the first half of it, but then got bogged down by the halfway point. I've worked in an office scenario like this before and easily recognized the stereotypes depicted by Ferris (part of the fun in the beginning was recognizing and assigning real life names to the characters, "Oh my God, that is totally Bubba!"--obviously names have been changed here to make sure I don't get my butt kicked by a former colleague). Part of the problem is that Ferris is so good at describing the minutiae of day-to-day life in an office--the petty bickering, the fight for the best office supplies, the gossiping that takes precedence over work--that I eventually began to feel like I was going to work every time I picked up the book.

This is not a bad book and it certainly has its merits. Ferris uses a peculiar point of view throughout the book that I have heard others complain about, but I found it was actually one of the strong points. The book is told from the "we" perspective, as though such is the mediocrity of their carbon copy lives that the mindless office drones can no longer think for themselves and instead think as a collective. As the book goes on, we begin to see individual characters emerge--usually as they are laid off from their jobs and, thus, their individuality is returned to them. In some cases, the individual character is someone who has become the poster child for a particular office stereotype and is granted an individual name based upon the collective's view of this person as "different" in some way: the person who is always last to know, the person who is always the first to know, the storyteller, the noncomformist, the perfectionist, the couple engaged in the interoffice affair. Also compelling is the stand alone chapter we get from the perspective of Lynn, the boss who is diagnosed with breast cancer and who struggles with keeping her private life and fears separate from the office.

As a whole, this was a clever conceit that would have done well as a novella, but it was wearing pretty thin by the 385 page mark. Watch Office Space--it does it better. ( )

A quirky book, this one had its moments of greatness & moments of just so-so writing. The narrator remains nameless, and yet a part of the action throughout. I was fine with that part. But the flow of the book left me a little miffed & it felt disjointed to me. It was a mix of comedy & seriousness, but I didn't particularly think they melded together quite right. The comedic parts were very "Seinfeld-esque", which I loved. I especially loved an early episode about a bookcase & a desk chair, & I wish there had been more of that. So I'm not quite sure how I felt about this one overall. I think I would've enjoyed it more had Joshua Ferris chosen a style of writing & stuck with it. ( )

A good book for those times when the day to day pointlessness of the work week is getting you down. This book is much, much funnier if you’ve actually spent time working in an office, in which case there are moments that will seem like Ferris must have actually had your job. The first-person plural is an interesting choice, and one he pulls off well, for the most part, although the small third person interlude in the middle was a welcome change. A bit drawn out at times, but overall a captivating read. ( )

Sigh. This is a book that probably started out as a bang-up short story. And in small doses, it's a pretty good voice-driven piece. Early on, the narrative perspective (told in the voice of "we thought this, we felt that, this annoyed us, we responded this way") wore thin. Very thin.

We stood around and shot the shit a lot, and we gossiped a lot, and we wasted time a lot, and surprisingly, we didn't like that people were getting canned a lot. But we didn't bother working a lot when the chance came to earn the right to be there--or when the chance came to save our skin. And when we moved on to other companies, we looked backed fondly and thought about our salad days. Ahhhh.

But what about the incongruous middle section? Where we become they and the narrative voice is now she--our boss? Yes, it's cleverly explained at the end, but if we stop reading the book, because it's annoying, and plodding, and we want to bash one another upon the head for standing around and gossiping instead of moving the PLOT along, for cripe's sake, well then, we never come to the end, and find out how clever the author is, do we?

Oh geeze. I know it's won all sorts of awards. And it's probably literature with capital L. But I couldn't wait to finish it, and that's not the sign of a great read for me. If I owned it, I'd give it to you in a heartbeat.

This one's a good library pick. Trust me. ( )

This story about the minutiae of office life is great, Despite having no discernable plot in terms of action, I loved the charaters and the anonymity of the narrator. It's well written, well crafted and strangely engrossing. Full of wit and pathos, I would definitley recommend this book to anyone looking for something a little different. ( )

I picked this up off of the "new book shelf" at the library in the hopes of finding something 'different' to read. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this journey out of my literary comfort zone. This book is quirky. Odd things happen & the drama is multi-layered. The point of view used seems unusual to me, but I don't read much general fiction so it may be a common device to speak of 'we' and 'us'. I did like the way it was used here to include the reader in the close-knit office environment. An unexpectedly satisfying read.

Corporate America is filled with cubicle dwellers and, if you are not one those now, it is very likely that you have been one sometime in the past. Some of us finally escape the dreaded cubicle jungle for good; others of us spend large chunks of our lives there. "Then We Came to the End" is the story of one such place, a Chicago ad agency suffering the steady drip of office layoffs due to the 2001 economic downturn. Joshua Ferris, himself a former member of Cubicle America, takes a tricky first person plural approach to tell this company’s story and his collective “we voice” makes it easy for cubicle veterans to identify with what he describes.

Ferris so successfully describes the office setting and its daily goings-on that some office veterans might cringe when he hits a little to close to home for comfort. This is an agency filled with people much like the ones you work with every day. You like most of them well enough, and even consider one or two of them to be good friends, but you almost never see them outside the office setting. Some of them have little habits and mannerisms that drive you nuts, some of them you find attractive, and you might even feel threatened by one or two others who always seem ready to stab you in the back if it means a move up the corporate ladder for them.

As the layoffs continue, surviving agency workers feel more and more pressure to look busy even as their actual workloads shrink to almost nothing. Rumors and speculation become the order of the day, and little clusters of whispering employees gather to discuss old rumors - and to send a few new ones out into the workplace themselves. They may not know each other very well but the employees have strong opinions about each other based on what they observe at the office. As office-mates disappear one-by-one and the company looks more and more unlikely to survive its downward spin, personal grudges, petty dislikes, and old rivalries become more and more important.

One laid-off copywriter sneaks back into the office and even attends meetings in an attempt to prove his worth to the agency. Another refuses to admit that he suffers depression but begins stealing prescription medicine from a co-worker’s desk. Others prefer to pretend that it is business as usual and they carry on with their office love affairs, both real and imagined. As their numbers dwindle, those still on the job become more and more frantic and strange things begin to happen. Workers raid newly vacated offices to find better chairs or office doodads for themselves; some fired employees tend return like bad pennies; and others begin to crack in their own rather unique ways.

Joshua Ferris put me back in a world I personally experienced not that long ago. His use of satirical dark humor to describe the office trauma in "Then We Came to the End" sets just the right tone for the story he tells. Ferris also has a knack for perfectly describing even the most minor of his characters, as he does, for instance, in the case of one loner payroll clerk: “Her office was a firetrap of put-off filing. Sandy had gray hair and wore one of those ribbed finger condoms that gives one speed in the sport of accounting.” (Hey, I think I know that woman.)

Despite my flashbacks, this was a fun book for me to read and I recommend it to anyone who has been there and is not afraid to go back one more time for a little visit.

Rated at: 4.0 ( )

This was just one of those books you pick up in the airport. To be perfectly honest (and shallow), it was the bright red and yellow cover that drew me in.

But what really interested me is the way in which the story was told. It's about the "we" - the office "subculture" is communal. "Then We Came to the End" is witty, brilliant and entertaining - a fairly lighthearted way to grapple with some pretty deep matters. ( )

We spend much of our lives at work, yet few books tackle the issues we encounter everyday there, and I've never ready any that do so as skillfully as this one. From office politics, gossip, cliques, rumors to the physical, mental, and emotional crises of co-workers this book packs a lot into it's pages. At first the collective 'we' of the narrator might seem strange, but it fits the topic of this story very well, as it is that collective 'we' and it's approval or disapproval that shapes many of the characters actions. The New York advertising office that is the backdrop for the story is facing hard times--the office workers are in continual fear of being laid off--but a bit of work comes there way in the form of an campaign to raise funds for Breast Cancer research. This seems to be related to the rampant rumors that one of the managers has breast cancer--and so begins the collective effort of the employees to find out the scoop on what is really going on with their manager, all while speculating on the chances that a former disgruntled employee will come back with a loaded gun for revenge.
This quirky novel has to be read by every cubicle dweller, it's exaggerated humor is so true to the office life that many of us lead. Yet it also has a downer side that is true to real life. I strongey recommend it to anyone who works '9-5' in a modern office environment. ( )

The We Came to the End was a little disappointing .I suppose the main problem was probably the advertising - it wasn't hilarious, it was funny at some points but I guess with the descriptions being provided I was expecting more of a Maxx Barry laugh-out-loud experience. I suppose if I wasn't already familiar with Barry, or the movie Office Space, or the show The Office (British or American versions) it would have been funnier. As it is, it was still ok...just not as great as it was being touted to be.

It may have suffered most (in my opinion) on the lengthy particular chapter on Lynn. I feel like if that info had been spread throughout the book it would have been more effective. Instead, it seemed like a separate book for the 30 or so pages that Lynn's story covered and it feels like it might have been added as an afterthought. ( )