The Unnamed

I suspect that the temptation to "walk away from it all" is a common one that almost everyone thinks about, even if only for an instant, at one time or another. Few of us, however, succumb to the temptation because our good sense allows us to control the fleeting urge to chuck it all away for a fresh start. What would happen, though, if, like Tim Farnsworth, the urge to walk away had to be responded to literally - no other option allowed? How would we survive the elements and the dangers of the streets? What would happen to those we leave behind? Joshua Ferris explores those questions in "The Unnamed."

Tim Farnsworth, a wealthy Harvard-educated attorney and partner at a prestigious New York City firm, lives with a monster: an unnamed show more disease that requires him to walk until he drops into a deep sleep from sheer exhaustion. The disease comes and goes, sometimes disappearing for years at a time, but when the urge to start walking strikes, Tim Farnsworth has no choice. He starts walking, and neither the obligations of his job nor those of his family can check his need to hit the streets.

Tim and his wife, by now, know what to expect when the disease returns. Tim is able to alert his wife to what his happening to him and she quickly outfits him in his warmest clothing and makes sure that he leaves the house (or office) with a backpack filled with things to help him survive on his own. Even all this planning does not always work, however, because Tim has a way of walking away from his possessions when coming out of one of his deep sleeps.

"The Unnamed," despite the bleakness of its theme, is a terrific character study because it places the reader deep inside Tim Farnsworth's head as he struggles to understand and control the disease that is slowly, but steadily, killing him. We share his frustration and despair when even the best doctors fail him; we worry with him about how his wife and daughter are holding up back home; we understand his anger at how his longtime legal colleagues take advantage of his illness; and, through his eyes, we see life stripped to its most fundamental elements.

This is a difficult novel to read because of its theme and storyline, and I have no quarrel with that. Ferris succeeds in making the reader feel Tim's struggle not to surrender to the hopelessness of his situation as the unnamed disease more and more dominates his life. As a result, some readers might, after putting down the book, be a bit reluctant to return to it. This feeling, though, only illustrates how successful Ferris is in making the reader feel the Farnsworth family's pain. On the other hand, I did struggle during the somewhat tedious section of the book during which Tim loses touch with reality to such an extent that he cannot distinguish the real world from his dream world. This overlong section of the book would have been more effective had it been presented concisely because, as it is written, I found myself rushing through it in order to get to the rest of the story.

"The Unnamed" is one of those books I will think about for a while - but not one that I am likely to want to read a second time. There is a lot to be gained from reading it once, however, and I recommend it to anyone ready to contemplate life at its most basic.

Rated at: 3.5 show less

Imagine that, one day, you are compelled to start walking. You HAVE to walk. You walk for hours until you collapse from exhaustion. The compulsion to walk can strike at any time, in any weather. You might be in the middle of a work meeting. You might be sitting at home talking to your wife. You don't want to walk, but you're forced to by some compulsion that no medical doctor can detect or define. And it seems like you might be the only one in the world who has this compulsion.

Imagine that you are married to a man who suffers from this walking compulsion. At any time of day or night, he might disappear from your home. Frantic, you drive your car searching for him. Sometimes you find him sleeping in a pile of snow, half-frozen, miles show more from your suburban home. Other times you have to wait until you receive a phone call telling you where he is. You love him ... you really do. But this walking compulsion is difficult to understand. What is making him do this? Why can't the doctors figure it out? Is this a mental illness? Is he faking it? Sometimes the stress of living with the uncertainty of his affliction is too much to handle. But then the compulsion disappears. Life gets back to normal. Until one day, "it" starts again.

This is the life of Tim and Jane Farnsworth. As the book opens, the walking has started again for the third time after stopping for a few years. As readers, we're plunged right into the thick of it—with Tim and Jane struggling to keep it together and maintain the life they've built since the last time "it" happened. Alternating between Tim and Jane's perspectives, the book explores how Tim's walking affects their lives, their marriage, and the life of their only daughter—who is just now beginning to fully understand what her father and mother have gone through.

I started this book early one evening, was quickly sucked in, and finished it in one night. I felt as compelled to read it as Tim was compelled to walk. The details on how Tim and Jane try to manage his walking were fascinating and horrible. And the choices that each makes to try and keep Tim's compulsion from destroying their lives were simultaneously tragic and heroic. My heart broke when Tim decided to try and spare Jane the continued horror of his affliction, and it broke again when he struggled to return to her in a time of need.

When I began reading, I was reminded of Stephen King's story, The Long Walk, which is wildly different but involves forced walking. (In the story, teenage boys are forced to walk until they are the last one standing or risk being shot to death.) When reading King's story, I was fascinated with the idea of being forced to walk far beyond what your body could take or endure. I rekindled that fascination when reading about Tim's walking. Ferris does a wonderful job of making the walking "come alive." At times, I felt like I was out there with Tim...tramping by empty fields or down the sides of abandoned highways. The logistics of how Tim and Jane try to cope with the walking interested me too. It was impossible for me not to imagine myself in Tim's place. What would I do if this happened to me? Interestingly, I never really imagined myself as Jane. In many ways, being Jane seemed like the more horrifying position to be in, which I think says something about me but I'm not sure what.

This felt like such an original book. When trying to figure out what "genre" to put it in, I was flummoxed. Is this is a thriller? In a way— but it doesn't really capture the depth and "literariness" of the book. I finally decided it was a Personal Dystopia. In most dystopian books, we see an entire world that is negative or horrifying. In this book, only Tim and Jane experience the dystopia. Their world is ripped apart in a way that no one else can fully comprehend or define. At one point, Tim wishes he suffered from something that was "named" and "known"—like cancer—something you could explain to someone and they could understand or sympathize with.

I loved this book. It was dark and bleak and haunting and compelling. If you're looking for something different to read and what I've described sounds intriguing, give this book a try. I imagine you'll find it as haunting and compelling as I did. (Just a word of caution: Don't start it if you don't have time to finish it any time soon. If you're like me, you won't be able to stop reading. It really was "unputdownable.") show less

I think I have a book crush on Joshua Ferris (or "Josh" as I call him when I talk back to his narration). I super liked [b:And Then We Came to the End|2025667|Then We Came to the End|Joshua Ferris|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1210008278s/2025667.jpg|2926759] and listening to The Unnamed, I felt hypnotized by the soft rhythms of his voice. Oh, Josh. Your new book is so sad. Are you, okay?

Here's the plot: Tim Farnsworth and his wife Jane are happily married, well off, etc. But they are dealing with a strange unnamed affliction. Tim has this problem where he just starts walking and he can't stop. He can't control where he's walking or how long he walks. He doesn't know when the walks will start or stop. He just get carried away by his show more legs and there's nothing he can do to stop it.

To me, this almost sounds like a funny premise. It has slapstick potential, right? But in my dear Josh's hands it is tragic. It adds stress to Tim and Jane's life the way that a terminal illness would, only Tim can't get the automatic sympathy a named illness would grant.

There is a really interesting look at the mind/body dichotomy in this book because Tim can't control his body and it's ruining his life. So he has a kind of psychotic break where he feels like he's two people: his mind that wants to stay put and his body that demands he walk.

Ultimately, it's Josh's writing that I love. The man has a gift for unpretentious, moving prose. This book is crushingly sad, but not in a way that made me angry or depressed. Instead I felt grateful that I don't have a disease, especially a strange unnamed walking one. show less

A pernicious notion is loose in the world, that it is somehow better to die in a defiant flash of youthful stupidity than it is to fade away, no matter that one's last thought in this world would then be the anguished discovery of one's own terminal idiocy. Dying young, stupid and afraid is held to be better than suffering; we're that brave in the face of life.

There's no shortage of suffering on display in The Unnamed, Joshua Ferris's second novel. Tim Farnsworth is a partner in a law firm, happily married with a teenaged daughter, inhabiting the suburbs, but he suffers from a strange, undiagnosed (and undiagnosable) affliction: he walks. That is, he is compelled to walk, to walk out on wife and daughter, on clients, on partners, and to show more continue walking until his strength fails. The condition comes and goes; it baffles medical science.

The implications for Tim's career are obvious. In the grip of this affliction, he feels keenly all the things -- wife and daughter -- he has taken for granted. But the disease is intractable, and as it worsens, Tim declares war on himself in an attempt to beat whatever it is inside him that is ruining his life.

Of course, he never really can come to grips with it -- it must remain the unnamed, a thing beyond understanding. It stands for all those things we cannot control or comprehend, all those uncertainties we fear and all those compulsions that drive us to act against our interests. This device is the centre of interest in the novel. It's Tim's bravery in the face of his fate, the question of whether he can beat it, whether he can understand what ails him, that keeps the reader turning the pages.

It also may keep the reader from considering that, through the first half of the novel, Tim is no more finely developed, as a character, than a John Grisham lawyer: he works long hours, does legal stuff like briefs and motions and things, and gets rich; he's Buried In His Work, he Neglects His Family For His Career, and so on. This character possesses no ability to suprise us, because he's essentially a lawyerly cliché.

Which may be deliberate. But then, wife Jane is less developed still, possessing no motivations beyond having a man, and daughter Becka remains, through 20-odd chapters, a teenaged caricature. Ferris's characters only come to life in their reaction to Tim's affliction. This defines them utterly. And consequently, the reader may find himself, at the half-way mark, wondering why he should give a shit what happens to them, no matter how capably Ferris turns a phrase.

But the novel gathers steam as Tim confronts his disease -- himself -- in the final third of the story. It's here that Tim finally comes to life as a character, here that the novel develops its real power -- power that is, unfortunately, undermined by the distance Ferris leaves between the reader and his characters throughout most of his narrative. show less

I generally don't read other reviews before I write my own because I don't want to be influenced by how other people read a book. But "The Unnamed" is an unusual book and I really wasn't sure I "got it", so I was curious what other people thought. And now I think I'm an audience of one...

So, from the other reviews you know the basics. Tim, high-powered lawyer, Jane good wife, Becka typical angst-ridden teen. Tim has a strange condition that makes him walk until he drops into exhausted sleep wherever he happens to fall. He wakes up, calls wife and she goes and gets him. This has happened two or three times in the marriage for unspecified periods of time, then just as mysteriously as it started, it ends and they all pretend it never show more happened. But during each of these episodes Tim has tried everything possible to find an explanation, gone to different doctors, high end clinics, psychiatrists, etc. Anything to find a diagnosis and a cure and to keep it a secret.

Until one day, after a long break, it comes back and he decides to stop trying to understand it and just keep walking. He gets the idea that it's his body, or something in his body (not his mind) that has a need to walk and that maybe he can walk it out of his body.

Now, here's where my take on the book seems to veer away from the other reviewers. I never doubted that Tim was in the grip of mental illness. Tim thinks of "him" as the entity that takes over his body and makes him walk. He talks to "him". He thinks he can defeat him by wearing down his body, he loses fingers and toes, he almost dies of sepsis, psychotropic medications help him. Sounds like schizophrenia to me.

Joshua Ferris made me feel that I was inside what was happening to these people. Other reviewers have mentioned a lack of character development. I agree with respect to Becka, I had no idea really who she was or how Tim’s condition really effected her. But I think the story was more about how a terrible turn of fact can effect a marriage. Joan is as much a "victim" of Tim's condition as he is and I thought that her responses all the way through were true to her character as written.

This was a different book, and I wouldn’t recommend it to everybody, but I really liked it and am anxious to read “Then We Came To The End.” show less

So, I read this at the same time I was reading Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin, and a lot of the same ideas come up in both books. No, Voluntary Simplicity does not encourage people to chuck it all, take a walk, and not turn back. But it does deal a lot with conscious action and awareness and how living consciously can often alienate us from the rest of society. In The Unnamed, main character Tim is trapped in the dichotomy between mind and body. He prefers---as many of us do---to live almost exclusively in his mind, until his malady hits and he's at the mercy of his body, his mind a mere passenger.

There's a scene in which Tim is sitting still, absorbed in something at the office late at night when he's surprised by the show more motion-sensor lights shutting off. The surprise pulls him back into his body, reminds him that he's not just a mind functioning on its own. This scene sums up the premise of the book for me.

There's the micro-version of this single-minded attention that excludes all else with Tim and his attorney colleagues focusing laser-like attention on the task at hand and ignoring all else around them, including their bodily needs and their families and the weather. Then there's the macro-version, in which there are signs all over of global warming and ecological disaster and people all over the country barely notice them (if at all) as they go about their lives. (This scenario is in Voluntary Simplicity, too.) Of course, everything seen from Tim's point of view is suspect, so the reader needs to decide for herself whether to trust Tim's perspective or not. Maybe there really aren't bees dying off; only Tim sees them because they don't exist for anyone else.

The story of Tim's illness seems to be a metaphor for the journey through life. We travel through life feeling complacent until something wakes us up and we reconnect mind and body and notice our surroundings as if for the first time. We travel through life as one individual ego, essentially separate from everyone else even though we are, in fact, connected to and dependent upon every other entity with which we share this world. What does it take to bring awareness to this interdependence and the need for compassion and collective action? What is the motion sensor light that will bring us back into the world?

All of which is a long way of saying I came upon this book at the exact right moment, I think, and I found it immensely satisfying. show less

Tim, a middle-aged lawyer, struggles with an unnamed disease that causes him to walk without stopping for hours. His wife Jane and teenage daughter Becka try to understand it and how it affects all of their lives. To me the point of this book is not the disease itself, but instead the relationships it affects.

A subplot is woven throughout the story that deals with a murder case Tim is working on. The case acted like a litmus test for the severity of his disease at the time. It was an interesting way to show how bad the symptoms were at any given point.

I loved the way Ferris describes each of the characters. I became fascinated not by the walking, but by his wife and daughter's responses to his walking over time. Their anger, show more frustration, love, disbelief, hopelessness were intoxicating. His own reactions were also interesting, but it was their point-of-view that I loved. I would absolutely recommend this.

An excerpt from the book...

"From the first bite of his sandwich to the last he ate mechanically and without pleasure. The ache of his jaw told him he had to finish. The duty of lunch had been acquitted." show less