Collect Then We Came To The End Designed By Joshua Ferris Issued As Textbook

“Do you realize how insane weve all become”

In the postDilbert world of “The Office,” examinations of the everyday absurdities and indignities of office culture have become more and more commonplace.
But rarely are they captured with such acuity, humor and grace as in Joshua Ferris stellar debut novel, “Then We Came to the End” a New York Times topfiction book of.
Office ennui is relatively easy to portray because, lets be honest, anyone who has ever worked in an office has experienced it firsthand.
But Ferris goes deeper than that he does nothing less than capture the zeitgeist of interoffice relations and how it affects us as human beings, smoothly wrapping it all up in a bitterly funny package.


The cubicledwellers inhabiting “Then We Came to the End” and its unnamed advertising agency are, by nature, not the stuff of epic fiction.
This, as Ferris so aptly puts it, is “a story set in the pages of an Office Depot catalog, of lives not nearly as interesting as an old man and the sea, or wateryworld dwellers dispelling the hypos with a maniacal pegleg.
” These are real, everyday people struggling to maintain their humanity in a corporate environment that threatens their individuality, consumes their lives, and is utterly necessary for them to survive.
Its the ultimate lovehate relationship, So when layoffs come calling, it brings out the best and, more often, the worst in the employees, They are often wellintentioned but mostly petty they bicker,

they tease, they steal, and they casually defame, they gossip, they trick, and they maneuver.
But they also support, worry, joke, laugh, love, and try to reform, These are people who are just trying to make it through the daily grind with their dignity intact and to them the ultimate indignity would be to be escorted out by security with all of their meager possessions in a box while their former coworkers try not to get the stain of association on them.


Ferris captures the complex, wideranging spectrum of emotions and attitudes that fester in the workplace, Jealousy, friendship, annoyance, and love all existing hand in hand and everpresent, even when it seems like they would contradict each other.
When a coworker succeeds, our unnamed narrator remarks that “we were proud, astounded, envious, incredulous, vaguely indifferent, ready to seize on the first hint of mediocrity, and genuinely pleased for him.
” That, my friends, is life, Ferris understands it, and he captures it brilliantly,

As an added bonus, “Then We Came to the End” is also wickedly funny, There are inspired hijinks related to rampant chairswapping and a vindictive office coordinator, a client asks the firm to capture the funny side of cancer in an ad, and our employees ever advertisers retouch the photo of a young girl in a missing poster because they think people will be more likely to respond if she doesnt look so pale and her smile isnt so crooked.
But there is a deadly serious streak as well, One character is grieving her murdered child, another one deals with illness and not so well at that, several people are downsized, one employee considers abortion while another struggles with depression, and a burst of violence shocks everyone near the end.
But Ferris, a deft writer in only his first outing as a novelist, seamlessly blends the dramatic and the funny without ever losing his wickedly satirical tone.


Characters may come across as callous, which may turn some readers off, while others may wonder what the point of this little exercise is clearly, theyve missed it completely, but I for one thoroughly enjoyed this book and have been feverishly recommending it since I finished it yesterday.
And I cant wait to see what the promising Ferris comes up with next,

Grade: A me and this book have a lot in common we think that capitalism sucks but we're trying really hard to be funny about it.


this book leaned on cancer a lot more in doing that than i would have, but otherwise we're two peas in a pod.


anyway. this was okay, i guess, i would say it's neither as funny nor as clever as it thinks it is, and when it comes to unlikable literary fiction about the death of society, ini'm spoiled for choice.
this wasn't a standout.

bottom line: just meh!

,A HILARIOUS SATIRE THAT SHOWS OFFICE DYNAMICS AT THEIR MOST PETTY AND PROFOUND FROM THE BOOKER PRIZESHORTLISTED AUTHOR, JOSHUA FERRIS

They spend their days and too many of their nights at work.
Away from friends and family, they share a stretch of stained carpet with a group of strangers they call colleagues,

There's Chris, clinging to his ergonomic chair Lynn, the boss, whose breast cancer everyone pretends not to talk about Carl, secretly taking someone else's medication Marcia, whose hair is stuck in the eighties and Benny, who's just well, just Benny.
Amidst the boredom, redundancies, water cooler moments, meetings, flirtations and pure rage, life is happening, to their great surprise, all around them.


Then We Came to the End is about sitting all morning next to someone you cross the road to avoid at lunch.
It's the story of your life and mine,

Joshua Ferris' mindblowing new book, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, is available to preorder now.


'Very funny, intense and exhilarating, . . For the first time in fiction, it has truly captured the way we work' The Times

'As dazzling as Franzen's The Corrections and as confident as Tartt's The Secret History.
. . Exceptional, very funny' Daily Telegraph

'Slick, sophisticated and very funny, Ferris's cracking debut has modern Everyman fighting for his identity in an increasingly impersonal world' Daily Mail Back in simpler times, network sitcoms reigned supreme for vegetative pleasure.
Even some further down our list of favorites could provide mild, mindless fun, I went into this book expecting something similar, It didnt take long, though, to realize that this was a cut above that, Ferris pieced together something funnier and more knowing, To couch it in sitcom terms, it was like those episodes of MASH where the normal humor and sarcasm would give way to something serious and poignant.
They were effective because we were made to like the characters first so that anything bad happening to them would have greater emotional mass.
I wont give away any of the books major plot points, but I will say that there were parts, especially in the middle section which really stood out, where some trenchant events were set up very well by a lighter touch beforehand.


The book is set at an advertising agency in Chicago in the not so distant past, Its an ensemble cast of mostly midlevel creative types doing whatever it is those types do at the office, Their activities included: working, gossiping, joking, politicking, backstabbing, notecomparing, consensusgathering about important nonoffice issues, and reflecting on their own situations, often tinged by paranoia.
In other words, just what youd expect, One thing that makes this different, though, is the first person plural narration, It was odd at first hearing “we” and “our”, but the device actually turned out to be pretty effective, Each character within the “we” is developed separately and thoroughly, but no single one of them becomes a dominant voice in the telling of the story.
I suspect Ferris had good reasons to go with the collective we, It may have been a way to comment on groupthink and the good and bad aspects of a team approach, Or it may have been a way to render unbiased opinions without being omniscient simply by mixing divergent views into an average.
In the process, the idiosyncrasies of individuals are made to stand out against modern office orthodoxy, But what do I know those are just guesses,

What I do know is that there were some characters worth caring about, The middle section I referred to earlier was a good example, It was like a separate, but connected story, In fact, it was no longer the first person plural narrator, Instead, a sensitive and insightful allseer took their place, Lynn, the talented and respected boss, faced an ordeal, or rather didnt face it, at least not head on, Her proactive, achievementoriented MO went AWOL, Other characters had issues to resolve, too, Some succeeded, and some didnt, It wasnt Andy Griffith, but it wasnt Curb Your Enthusiasm either,

So from my experience you should go into this expecting a few grins, some mildly amusing banter, and a mise en scene from the likes of Dunder Mifflin, but come away knowing you got a fair amount more than that.
This was a solideffort,
I came upon this book on one of the book blogs I read after it was shortlisted for the National Book Award.
The reviews compared Joshua Ferris' debut novel in tone amp content to "The Office," the bestminute network sitcom since Seinfeld and a current obsession of mine.
So, Then We Came to the End sounded like it had good possibilities, And when I came to the end of it, I found myself having enjoyed it, despite some obvious flaws,

I have to start by commenting on the firstperson plural narration because it is something that is unique and identifiable about this book, and it's cleverly also embedded in the title of the story.
I thought it was effective for the most part, especially in our initial tour of the office when we're trying to get to know all of the characters and there are a LOT.
What Ferris gets out of the "we" that a writer of lesser talents might neglect is real emotional content: "We were still alive,.
. . The sun still shone in as we sat at our desks, Certain days it was enough just to look out at the clouds and at the tops of the buildings, We were buoyed by it, momentarily, It made us 'happy. ' We could even turn uncommonly kind, " Those kind of sentiments, even when they are surrounded by playfulness and absurdity and awful cynicism, they still worked for me.


Ferris also shows great ability to craft characters, This is a novel largely built around the idea that corporate America at the dawn of thest century is hollow and absurd and that we want nothing more out of life than security and stasis.
To that end, there are plenty of characters here who fit into that faceless corporation mold, and who only pop up to show how sad amp unfeeling our society has become the office coordinator, for example.
But there is a heart to these people, and that is evident in characters like the deranged Tom Mota, the clueless Jim Jackers, the totempole worshipping Benny Shasburger and the always professional Joe Pope.
I think the danger that Ferris faced in writing this novel was relying too much on stereotypes in the workplace, because there are weird people in every office, but there are enough REAL human people here to latch onto to carry you through the story.


On the down side, the novel definitely loses its momentum in the second half, There are essentially two halves of the corporate tale, interupted by apage interlude where we lose the firstperson plural voice and we find an unexpected meditation on mortality and loneliness.
That interlude was where the novel first surprised me, and I was excited that we might be headed somewhere far deeper and darker than I had expected.
But the promise of that interlude was not realized in the second half, We return to the everyday and there comes a real heavy plot device that brings the story to a close, and there is an even more contrived device to bring all these characters together in a reunion.
There is also a significant nod given to the events of/, and how those events may have triggered a change in corporate culture, but it is only a nod, and it is not commented upon at all during the reunion postscript.


All in all, it was worth the read, It was entertaining and wellwritten, and it had a heart to it, but it didn't have the guts to weigh in on every question it raised, or take the reader to a place of greater understanding or sympathy for these people, and in that, I thought there was an opportunity missed.
.