Then We Came to the End

Ok, I’ll admit it: I hated this book from the moment I saw it. The stylised front cover, cluttered with little people in various ‘office poses’, the cursive orange font, the Richard and Judy book club sticker…it all made me shudder. The blurb bored me and I objected to the idea that this was ‘the story of my life’. I quite like my life, usually. And it definitely isn’t because I think it’s a sitcom, which is what this book seemed to think it was. Looking on the bright side, no book could possibly be as irritating as I anticipated this one being. Or could it?

The premise

There’s a bunch of supposedly eccentric yet charmingly ‘typical’ people who happen to work in an office. Stuff happens, particularly redundancies, show more gossip and mental breakdowns. This is all meant to be humorous. The narrative voice talks about ‘we’ rather than ‘me’ for most of the book and this suggests that the members of the office are some strangely consistent entity. It is intended to be a satirical view of the American workplace.

My thoughts or, more accurately, a summary of the irritations I experienced

Due to my lack of interest in the whole concept, it took me a while to begin this book. When I did, I wished I hadn’t. Maybe I’d ‘get it’ more if I had ever worked in an office but I found this extraordinarily dull and not at all humorous. In fact, I failed to complete this in time for the book group session on it (a rarity for me, but I’d never have even picked this up if I wasn’t asked to!) and spent a good couple of months forcing myself to read it all out of sheer stubbornness. I was sure I must be missing something and hoped that perhaps the last 50 pages would reward all my diligence. They didn’t.

My biggest irritation was the lack of a central storyline. Instead, there are several narrative threads which recur throughout the book, such as one worker’s potential cancer, another’s difficult marriage and the struggle of several colleagues to accept being made redundant. Gradually, over nearly 400 pages, events become clearer and fit together a bit more. However, despite a kind of postscript at the end of the book, there is little sense of resolution because there was very little to resolve. Indeed, events are often mentioned right at the beginning of the book, so there is no narrative tension; instead I felt there was narrative confusion caused by the shifts back and forth in time. Initially I had to flick back through the pages fairly frequently to remind myself who a particular character was and what was happening to him. I found this irritating and felt that I couldn’t get involved or interested in the story. Later, when I had a firmer grasp of who was who, I realised I didn’t really care about what happened to them as I didn’t feel like they were convincingly rounded characters.

I also found the lack of a central character problematic. I was irritated by the perpetual ‘we’. I appreciate that co-workers share gossip and often share perspectives on situations that involve them, but the lack of an individual voice grated on me. Bizarrely, there are 20 pages in the middle of the book which are written in the first person. This allowed me an insight into one of the character’s lives for the first time and I thought it was a shame that the rest of the book wasn’t written this way. Personally, I prefer books with a clear focus, even if that focus does shift periodically. This just felt like a mish-mash.

Although there is direct speech and dialogue throughout, it tends to be interspersed with commentary and sometimes takes place in different time periods. Because of this, I felt that the whole narrative was a summary of events rather than an unfolding of them. For me, this meant that events lacked dramatic immediacy and I was uninterested in the summarised events. This wasn’t helped by the shifts in time. The lack of focus could explain the lengthy chapters: the first two take up 96 pages between them. I prefer books with clear chunks and places to digest what I have read. Although there were regular breaks, the ‘story’ itself was so weak that there rarely seemed to be a genuine pause.

Finally, I disliked the world Ferris presented. It is entirely possible that offices are full of barely sane, deeply troubled characters who hate each other. I am definitely willing to believe in office gossip and the tendency to avoid work. Overall though, the bitchiness and pettiness troubled me. In fairness, I suspect that I am deliberately disregarding those aspects which do ring true due to my overall irritation with the book. I think that in some ways this is a very sharp rendering of the daily squabbles which seem so important in the claustrophobic and often fraught world of the modern workplace. This is probably the real strength of the book: the way it exposes our daily struggles to be part of a team and enjoy success while finding some colleagues seriously frustrating. Ferris certainly captures this frustration.

Conclusions

So, I loathed it. Who would I recommend it to? People who work in offices, perhaps. People whose sense of humour is different to mine. People who like books which meander their way to a sort of stop. People who can enjoy a book which describes the antics of a range of characters and don’t need a central, sympathetic character. Someone somewhere likes it: it has won at least two awards in America, including one for ‘best first novel’. It has had very positive reviews in British newspapers. I’m sure there is an audience for this book but my rating reflects my own sincere, heartfelt irritation. show less

In Joshua Ferris’s funny, sharp-tongued debut, employees at a Chicago advertising agency face down an economic downturn with the only tool at their disposal: gossip. The book is narrated not by a single character, but by an all-encompassing “we,” who gather in cubicles and around water coolers to whisper about who will be fired next, who is sleeping with whom, and whether there might be free bagels in the staff room today. It sounds like satire, like most books about office workers are. But Then We Came to the End has a kind and generous spirit. The characters are funny and sometimes absurd, but Ferris reminds at every turn of their humanity. In the end, this brilliant, energetic novel has as much tragedy in it as comedy, and that show more tragedy is made all the more palpable because Ferris makes us care about his frustrating, frustrated characters so very much. show less

Poor Joshua Ferris. The classy contemporary writers of literary fiction who've blurbed his novel Then We Came to the End have compared him to Joseph Heller ("Then We Came to the End is the Catch-22 of the business world…" says Jim Shepard) and Peter DeVries ("…penned with a Devriesian sharpness…" according to Katharine Weber); they proclaim, "This is a novel, by God!" (Geoffrey Wolff) and "Awfully funny." (Nick Hornby). Geoff Dyer even observes that "It almost made me wish I had a job." What a burden for a first time novelist! Even if he's got a good book--which Joshua Ferris certainly does here--what lofty expectations to set for a prospective reader. I'm happy to say that, although I would not compare this novel to the work of show more Joseph Heller nor that of Peter DeVries (not as cynical as the one nor as cranky as the other), and although I wouldn't call it awfully funny, it was--as Geoffrey Wolff says--"a novel, by God!" And a damned good one.

Then We Came to the End is composed of three sections. Ferris employs, in the first and third of these, an unusual and somewhat risky narrative voice. He uses the first person plural to create a narrator who is both of the action--"We were fractious and overpaid," the book begins. "Our mornings lacked promise."--and above it, as an omniscient presence. This device, which for the first fifty pages or so felt cold, detached and gimmicky, warmed, as the book progressed, becoming intimate and inviting, and as the reader got into the minds and lives of the characters she began to feel included as a part of the action.

The successes and tragedies of these characters, from the insignificant--squabbling with the wannabe-supply-sergeant of an office coordinator who has her own system of serial numbers to track furniture and ensure that it stays in the office to which it's been assigned, to the heart-rending--the bottomless grief of the mother of a murdered child, who has to pass the giant billboard advertising her child as missing every evening on her way home from work, because the vendor who owns the space doesn't have a new ad to place there--slowly become the reader's own successes and tragedies. And when, in the short (thirty- four pages) second part of the book the narration switches to the more traditional third person omniscient, and concentrates on just one character, it just, well, feels right.

Then We Came to the End has been compared to Office Space and The Office, and there is some validity to those comparisons, such as, say, a recognition of the inherent absurdity of spending forty hours a week in intimate contact with complete strangers. But as good as the aforementioned pieces of film are, Joshua Ferris's novel is that much better. It might not make you "wish you had a job" as it did Geoff Dyer (after all, who really wants to work in a big, soul-sucking office?), but it will certainly make you glad you've taken the time to read. show less

I enjoyed this book quite thoroughly from beginning to end. Beautiful transitions, acute observations of the working environment, characters that seamlessly took over the narrative and told the stories in such an engaging way. I love the division piece in the middle about Lynn, the way it splits the book up, the way it comes up again at the end. This book made me laugh and it made me feel all choked up and all in this unique point of view that feels like the narration of some company branding video gone bizarre. A solid book, one I'll read again, if only to track down some of those terrific lines.

This meandering tale of a group of co-workers who spend more time gossiping about one another than they do working, even in the face of an economic downturn, makes up in sheer style what it might lack in plot.

Ferris has assembled a cast of characters with the same kind of goofiness that pervaded “The Office” and occasionally even rings with the same tone of “M*A*S*H” or "Catch-22", but without the blood. Even as the reader may be allowed a bit of impatience at the juvenile hijinks of the workplace, anyone who has ever worked in an office will recognize the petty frustrations and the ego-driven conflicts. A continuing thread dealing with the poaching of office equipment from recently-vacated cubicles is probably the funniest show more motif in the book; many of the other situations actually depend on an essential sadness that pervades cubicle-land.

Most of the book is written from an unusual first-person plural viewpoint: “When someone quit, we couldn’t believe it.” “We wanted to die looking stupid in front of Lynn, but we didn’t mind it in front of Joe.” The single exception is a third-person chapter in the midst of all this middle-school nattering in which a character faces the prospect of a looming surgery that is terrifying to her.

“The Thing to Do and the Place to Be” could easily be a stand-alone short story, and one could entertain the notion that the rest of the novel actually sprang up to accompany it. Powerful and frightening, it’s something that will stick with the reader for a long time, particularly if they have ever found themselves at a similar crossroads.

Ferris wraps all this up with a bittersweet coda set at a time when the team has gone their separate ways. Some questions are answered – a few with borderline unbelievable resolutions -- while others are allowed to play out unresolved.

Kind of like life, actually. show less

Brilliant. The workers at this failing advertising agency become increasingly paranoid as layoffs get closer and closer to them personally. The ridiculous things that they do seem reasonable when they are in the thick of them, but when you pull back a bit, you wonder how intelligent people can find themselves in those situations. But, I can tell you that it happens all the time in big corporations. This was more insightful than I expected, and also hilarious.

Second reading: I'm feeling that achy-love feeling that comes when you've turned the last page of a really good book. What really struck me this time around was the quality of the writing, how everything is so well said and purposeful and just right. It's something that I notice a lot more as I get older, an author's use of language and style, and I have no tolerance for flabby meandering writing. Reader, this book is sharp and on point. Highly recommend.

First reading: Feels kind of like the movie "Office Space", but better. Seriously.

The book starts off less like a novel and more like a collection of great anecdotes your friend is sharing during happy hour. This was a little unexpected for me, but it only took about a chapter to get show more into the flow. About halfway through the story structure becomes more linear and plot-focused.

I have to share the following passage because my office just went through the exact same thing with our second floor, and the author totally nailed the feeling:
"[Floor:] Fifty-nine was a ghost town. We needed to gather up the payroll staff still occupying a quarter of that floor and find room for them among the rest of us and close down fifty-nine, seal it off like a contamination site. Odds were we were contractually bound to pay rent on that floor through the year, shelling out cash we didn't have for real estate we didn't need. But who knows - maybe we were keeping those abandoned cubicles and offices in hopes of a turnaround. It wasn't always about ledger work at the corporate level. Sometimes, like with real people, it was about faith, hope, and delusion." show less