Pretty Glad When I Came to the End: Let Down by Joshua Ferris's 'Then We Came To The End"

If you talk about this book, you have to talk about the narrative gimmick.

The majority of the book’s narration takes place in the second person plural.

That means it is all “We did this,” and “We did that”.

It was distracting at first. I think it was on page 18 when I said to myself that the gimmick fades away. Actually, it was page eighteen, because I made a note of it in my head. It was kind of like the vernacular in Clockwork Orange or the novels of Irving Welsh. The narrative fade away. The closest comparison is “Bright Lights, Big City,” where McInerney gives a sense of immediacy to the narrative by using the second person. All the action in that novel is “You do this,” etc. It really personalizes what’s going on as a reader, perhaps even more so than a straight first person narration.

The problem, narrative, is that the “We” creates a distance, even though it is a first person form. As a reader you don’t feel included, but the “We” refers to a group of people, and you never get a sense of who the person(s) speaking are supposed to be.

That said, Ferris nails office life. He does it so well, I almost didn’t want to read the book when I came home from my own office. Why make your leisure reflect your work hours.

The book is structured in basically four main parts, two large parts with the “We” structure, with an interlude between focusing on the office’s boss’s cancer. There is a coda that is five years after the main action, where the interlude is transformed to a book one of the character was writing.

Hold on. Here’s what the book is about. An advertising agency deals with the recession of the late 90s – early aughts. People are laid off one by one in a process that seem like it is taking a year (In a similar situation I was in, turnover was much more drastic and quick). They all deal with losing colleagues and the anxiety that they may be next in their own way. One guy is mad, and comes back dressed as a clown ready to….
But I don’t want to spoil anything, since that’s the only real action of the book.

The worst part is that the main action of the book end on September 11th. So the book goes from a writing class exercise with some truths about the workplace and grows a Ham Fist. The closing coda doesn’t help, especially the last sentence. Especially the last sentence. It hangs a lampshade on the whole narrative gimmick. The book wasn’t bad, but it could have been so much better.

The funny thing is that there is a short interview with the author at the end. One of my thoughts was that the part with the sick boss was a bit of pathos-laden overkill, and the book would have improved with the elision of that segment and the whole subplot. In the interview, Ferris calls that part the narrative center of his book. I guess we’re reading his work differently.

Chester Brown's "Ed the Happy Clown"

Confession time: I only picked this up because my name can be shortened to Ed and sometimes I like to dress up as a clown. But we all read books for different reasons, that in no way invalidates that I read this book and enjoyed it, for the most part. When I had just started reading it, my wife asked me how it was, and I told her “Weird and dark,” to which she replied that it might not be the best thing to read before bed. I should listen to my wife more, but I didn’t here. There’s a story about Ed and a vampire woman and Ronald Reagan from an alternate dimension finding himself in existence in a very weird place in our dimension. My only criticism is that there is action that is logical from frame to frame, but there is no real overall arc. Reading the end notes of this edition shows that the writer, Chester Brown, seems to have written that way too, so early on there is not real strong characterization of any of the characters until he finds their voices. I liked this more as a way that it shows an artist’s potential, and I will check out some of his later work, but this is lacking in a way I can’t fully articulate.

General Props to Tom Holt, and here in specific "Doughnut".

Tom Holt is someone I only discovered recently. I was looking for a writer to fill the void of smart funny writers that I had since Vonnegut died and I caught up with the Terry Pratchett series and Tom Robbins is not nearly prolific enough. Holt fits the bill, and he is woefully unknown in the states. He writes smart fiction that takes off from what we know of science and plays with it. It is like comedic science fiction, but I don’t know if that pigeon –holes him too much. Here he takes the idea of an analogue of the Large Hadron Collider blowing up and multiverse theory. Some bits are overdone – the main character has an invisible hand – but overall the effect is a fun ride of speculative fiction. I’ve only read his five most recent books, but I’m glad he has a big back catalogue.