Then We Came to the End

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

Hysterical office satire played as the modern workplace socially akin to junior high. Insecurity, gossip, miscommunication and stupid swirl amongst the colorful denizens of a Chicago advertising agency in fiscal decline. Famously and effectively written in the first person plural, the book beautifully shifts in perspective and time, a story told in disjointed second-hand accounts of characters' strange rumors and moronic obsessions. Such a funny book that even the tedious workplace humdrum is zany and engaging.

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

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

I've avoided this book for years because of the gimmick--first person plural--but the truth is that for the setting, it works like a charm as it overlays all the office inhabitants relating these stories to each other as part of the story, because at work you gossip, even if you can't stand anybody.

At times so funny I would make my wife listen to me read passages aloud--Yop and the chair saga, Jim Jackers' Uncle--at times the heartbreaking of a lost child, of breast cancer, sometimes the heartbreaking mundanity of: this is what we do. And then we came to the end.

Many readers will probably accuse Joshua Ferris of hitching his debut novel to a cheap gimmick. Narration in the first person plural? C'mon! Part of me wants to argue that this shifting of narrative perspective is merely one step in a natural progression. Narrators who make friends with their audience while they tell them their stories go back at least as far as "The Brothers Karamazov;" what Ferris has done here is move this familiar, ingratiating narrator-friend closer to the center of the story's action. The nameless storyteller is both a convenient vehicle for his (or her) story and a participant in it, although because they are never named, they are denied any particular agency. Our passive, elephant-memoried storyteller expresses show more no real opinions of his or her own and always goes along with the crowd, so, in a sense, using the second-person plural makes perfect sense. It's a testament to Mr. Ferris's skill that "Then We Came to the End" reads so naturally and is so much fun to read.

And it really is funny. There's a lot of workplace humor around lately, from "Dilbert" to "The Office," but Stephen King's mention of "Catch-22" in his blurb is spot-on. Ferris seems to have, like Joseph Heller did, an eagle eye's view for the mechanics of organization-wide ridiculousness. He's also got an easy, shaggy storytelling manner that suits his material. He's not afraid of big words, necessarily, but he never lets them get in the way of a good yarn. Some readers, I think, will question Ferris's decision to include a first-person interlude, written from the perspective of an ad executive battling cancer, in the middle of all the good fun, but I won't second-guess him here. They author may have wanted to prove to readers and critics that he could play it straight, of course, but this section also effectively shows the limitations of gossip, work friendships, and the perspective he uses for the rest of the book. Ferris's anonymous narrator is full of stories, but seldom manages to see the objects of his or her gossip for who they are. Co-workers die, they get fired, they get married, they live mysterious lives on the weekend. When people move on from their workplace, they hardly seem to leave a trace. "Then We Came to the End" isn't exactly a "work sucks" manifesto, but I think that Ferris is slyly arguing that the American obsession with work doesn't really bring us much closer to our workmates in human terms. Indeed, when he introduces a talented, successful author who memorializes a colleague in the novel's last pages, I think he's making a case that fiction might still be the best way to figure out what's inside of others, and of ourselves, too. show less

My first and last impressions are: creepy! It took me a while to figure it out but it all comes to Emerson's quote: to be a faceless unit in the group is to be a disgrace. This is the main theme demonstrated by the use of the "we", the gossip, the mindless behavior and Benny's inability to adapt to any new environment - a hopeless reminder of a brainless mob. From this stand out Lynn and Joe, beacons of hope and courage, each in their own way. A brilliant construction and an incisive look at the workplace dynamics.