Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

book data

7,184 ratings, 3.41 average rating, 2,130 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		13%
4		36%
3		32%
2		13%
1		4%

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published

March 1st 2007 by Little, Brown and Company

binding

Hardcover, 385 pages

literary awards

PEN/Hemingway Award (2007); National Book Award Finalist (2007)

isbn

0316016381 (isbn13: 9780316016384)

description

The dot-com bubble has burst and rolling layoffs have hit an unnamed Chicago advertising firm sending employees into an escalating siege mentality as ...more

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01/12/08

Bart rated it:

Read in January, 2008

recommended to Bart by: New York Times Notable Books
recommends it for: Fans of MFA fiction

Because so many of the GoodReads folks are participants or graduates of MFA programs, and because Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is so obviously the product of an MFA program, I thought to hedge and give this book three stars. But that would be dishonest.

Truth is, but for 34 pages in the middle of this novel, I didn't enjoy Ferris's debut at all. Oh, it's witty and flippant and clever and occasionally funny, but ultimately it's not enjoyable.

It fails for the r...more Because so many of the GoodReads folks are participants or graduates of MFA programs, and because Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is so obviously the product of an MFA program, I thought to hedge and give this book three stars. But that would be dishonest.

Truth is, but for 34 pages in the middle of this novel, I didn't enjoy Ferris's debut at all. Oh, it's witty and flippant and clever and occasionally funny, but ultimately it's not enjoyable.

It fails for the reason so many MFA-workshopped novels fail: It's a technically proficient piece of writing about unserious folks discovering truths that serious persons generally know long before their 30th birthdays.

Then We Came to the End begins like a sequel to the movie "Office Space", written by Chuck Palahniuk. It's written in the first-person plural, which is about the extent of its original contributions. We this, and we that. It's neither annoying nor enticing - but it seems to want to provoke commentary.

On Page 2, we get this insight: "Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die."

One of the great discoveries that happens in this novel, over the next 384 pages, is that persons do, as it turns out, die. At the very end of the novel - six years later - we learn that a number of the officemates in fact died. Why kill off these innocuous folks? Who knows? maybe to appear serious?

But there's a piece of writing, an accomplishment of actual storytelling, that begins on Page 196 and treats the pathos of a person recently diagnosed with breast cancer. All the zaniness and shallowness of the novel's first half are temporarily forgotten while Ferris does an exceptionally good job of writing. From Page 196 to 230, this novel transcends itself and its pedigree. These 30 pages are the novel's best pages, and Ferris (or his editor) knows it.

How do we know he knows it? Because after another 150 or so pages of cleverly describing office luncheons and chair-swapping capers and employee layoffs, Ferris comes back to it. He gives his least memorable character the task of reuniting all the unlikable folks from the office, six years after their end, for a reading of his novel.

What excerpt is read? Part of the breast-cancer story from pages 196-230.

On Then We Came to the End's back cover, an author named Jim Shepard writes, "The real revelation here is how moving it all becomes . . ." I disagree.(less)

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08/29/07

Patrick rated it:

Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: promising debut novelist addicts

I LIKED:
(1) How funny it was;
(2) The first-person-plural voice, which could have backfired but didn't for me;
(3) The guy who quotes Emerson (it was around here that I started to feel actual warmth for the characters, even when I couldn't keep them straight);
(4) The Catch-22ishness (though it wasn't slavishly Catch-22esque, which you might initially think);
(5) The very last line, which maybe could be considered gimmicky, but worked for me and which I read with wh...more

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02/20/08

Edan rated it:

(review of isbn 031601639X)

I was tempted to write this review in the plural first person so that you all would be impressed with how clever I am, but, fuck it, I have a novel to write and papers to grade! (Plus, what if you thought I was speaking in the royal 'we' or the blogger 'we' and the whole experiment just failed?!)

Ferris displays some technical savvy in this book. The point of view tired me out on my first attempt, but a month or so later I returned to the novel with an open mind (and heart, I suppos...more I was tempted to write this review in the plural first person so that you all would be impressed with how clever I am, but, fuck it, I have a novel to write and papers to grade! (Plus, what if you thought I was speaking in the royal 'we' or the blogger 'we' and the whole experiment just failed?!)

Ferris displays some technical savvy in this book. The point of view tired me out on my first attempt, but a month or so later I returned to the novel with an open mind (and heart, I suppose), able to fall into the 'we' without a problem at all. The way in which the book brings individual characters into focus is pretty terrific, actually. I am forever attached to Tom Mota, for example, after what he did for Janice--and I'm impressed that Ferris was able to connect me in such a way, given the somewhat alienating distance of the "we" voice. Throughout I felt a sort of hatred for the 'we', perhaps because I've never worked in an office, and probably because if I did, I'd be the Joe Pope or even the Lynn Mason: working, working, while some dipshits goofed off in the next office. I am a nerd, and a harsh task master.

My reading experience with this novel was really conflicted. I always wanted to read it, but once I was reading it, I felt annoyed, bored, frustrated--except for brief moments of comedy and sadness that really hit me. But, after being bored/annoyed/frustrated, I'd come back to the book a couple hours later, dying, again, to read it. How is this possible? Maybe Ferris and I need to go to couple's therapy.

I was actually genuinely interested in the advertising the firm was doing, and yet, the narrative would veer away from the actual work (which wasn't paying, but whatever), to discuss a character's gossip for pages upon pages. I understand that this is the point of the book, but it just didn't mesmerize me (except for the 'buckshelves' section, which I still laugh at). The third-person section about Lynn Mason fell flat for me. It wasn't moving in the way it should have been, or could have been.

I did, however, love the last thirty pages, especially the last line, which shifted the point of view from a technical and thematic acrobatic to something poignant and intimate.

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12/17/07

Patrick rated it:

(review of isbn 031601639X)

bookshelves: books-read-in-2008

Read in May, 2008

recommends it for: Anyone who has ever worked in an office

It's funny how certain books just come along at exactly the right time in your life. I read 'Franny & Zooey' when I was right out of college and just starting my life as a post-grad in the city, and it really spoke to me. I read 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' the summer before my senior year, when I was panicking about what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and it completely changed the way I looked at myself and the world around me. If I had read 'Then We Came to the End'...more It's funny how certain books just come along at exactly the right time in your life. I read 'Franny & Zooey' when I was right out of college and just starting my life as a post-grad in the city, and it really spoke to me. I read 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' the summer before my senior year, when I was panicking about what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and it completely changed the way I looked at myself and the world around me. If I had read 'Then We Came to the End' 3 years ago, I wouldn't have understood or appreciated it as much as I do now, removed from the rat race just enough to still remember it vividly, but not so entrenched that I still harbor the same bitterness about that world.

I worked at a corporate job for just over 2 years when I was fresh out of college, and I was completely miserable doing it. The long hours, the shitty treatment from people higher up the ladder than you, the gossiping and backstabbing...it's really no way to live. And yet, even though so many of us feel this way, we still trudge to our cubicles every day and put up with the same sad song and dance day in and day out, longing for the weekends and bemoaning how quickly they pass, all while doing nothing about it, even going so far as to scoff and be incredulous about the mere prospect of making a change.

Joshua Ferris is a product of this world, but he's one of the lucky ones who found the strength to escape. His recognition of the corporate world is obvious when speaking about the universal feelings of the office worker, and his use of 1st person plural as a narrative device is the sort of gimmick that wouldn't work, or would be too precious or cute, in any other setting, but perfectly captures the tone for such an environment. By referring to each individual character in the novel on their own terms, but keeping the voice of the novel as 'we', Ferris is able to strike a perfect balance of connecting the reader to the larger picture and relating to his protagonists while also making each one feel like a real person with their own quirks and charms. Everyone knows a Benny Shassburger, the guy around the office everyone goes to to vent, or a Karen Woo, the ice queen who always seems to be right about everything. Yet the beauty of the narrative device is also connecting these individuals to the greater whole. It's easy to forget that these vibrant characters also feel the same quiet desperation as the rest of the group. It's a neat trick, and it works because a corporate office is the sort of place that fosters these common feelings among unique individuals who you never really know.

And that brings me to one of the main themes of the book (at least in my opinion), the tenuous bond we have with the people we work with. In other words, the feeling that for all the time we spend with our co-workers, we'll never really know them in any tangible way, and that, vice versa, our co-workers will know us in a way completely different (or even contrary, to) the way those close to us in our personal life will know us. For example, the totem pole that Old Brizz left to Benny, or Tom Mota's affinity for Ralph Waldo Emerson, or even Lynn Mason's much rumored battle with cancer. There are simply things about us that we don't let others see, and this book reflects that perfectly.

The end of the book was perfect as well. When you leave a workplace, you always think you'll be friends with these people forever. After all, these are the people who got you through the day, the ones whose jokes and good humor lifted your spirits when the rest of the corporate world attempted to assassinate your spirit. Then you leave, and maybe an e-mail or two is exchanged, or a drink is had after work before you completely lose touch, and, before long, you find yourself forgetting what people looked like, or unable to place the name of a person you saw every day for years. It's nobody's fault, per se; it's just what happens. People move on, they find new people to have drinks and make jokes with, different coworkers to gripe about, and new bosses to hate. This book shows that, but not in a bitter, resentful way. It just is, and Ferris acknowledges that, and the muted sadness contained in such realizations.

The book was not without its flaws, of course. There were parts that could be conceived as a little preachy or pretentious, some elements that might seem a little too fantastic for the real world. But these are minor gripes, and overall, Ferris handles it all with subtlety and aplomb. 'Then We Came to the End' is a great book that avoids (and even acknowledges, via Hank Neary towards the end) the pitfalls that can easily accompany such a novel. Required reading for anyone who has ever endured corporate life.
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08/08/08

Shelly rated it:

Read in July, 2008

I really, really, really enjoyed reading this book. It wasn't a life changing experience, it didn't inspire me to be a better person, or to follow my dreams. It was just a fun read. I'll turn 37 in a few days and for the first time in my life I'm working in an office building, in a cube. Before I got this job, I thought The Office and Office Space were funny, but now I really get them. It's the same with this book. I don't think you have to work in an office to get it, but it's sort of like ha...more I really, really, really enjoyed reading this book. It wasn't a life changing experience, it didn't inspire me to be a better person, or to follow my dreams. It was just a fun read. I'll turn 37 in a few days and for the first time in my life I'm working in an office building, in a cube. Before I got this job, I thought The Office and Office Space were funny, but now I really get them. It's the same with this book. I don't think you have to work in an office to get it, but it's sort of like having Cancer--unless you've had it, you only know about it on a superficial level.
The novel takes place in an ad agency in Chicago. At first I thought, Oh, I'm not going to be able to relate to these characters. I HATE admen/women. I HATE the advertising industry. What kind of person spends their days thinking up ways to dupe me into buying shit I don't need? Bunch of Jerks. But then at one point Ferris's narrator describes himself (and his co-workers) as "hired guns of the soul." (or somethingtothateffect), and I was like "So they know?" Of course they know. And that's what's so fucking tragic about this story. Most of us have to set our alarms Monday-Friday so that we can get our asses out of bed, leave dream-time and comfort behind, and head off to our cubes. Most of us have un-fulfilling, soul-destroying, creativity-robbing "careers". We spend the day under and in front of artificial lights, surrounded by muted grays and taupes, at first anxiously awaiting lunch, and then anxiously awaiting five o' clock. But the sad and hard truth of the matter is, as the book poignantly affirms, we need these jobs. As much as we may not want our jobs, we really don't want to lose them. So we make the best of it. We gossip with and about co-workers. We come up with new ways to waste time. We compare our jobs and our lives to others that suck worse. Commiseration: It makes the world go round.

Before I go I feel compelled to mention that as much as I liked the book, I felt the end dragged on a bit. So go ahead and skim the last couple of chapters, you'll get the gist.

Also, if you happen to be reading this and you happen to be one of those rare folks whose job is financially, intellectually, and spiritually rewarding--I don't want to hear about it; please keep it to yourself. (less)

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07/26/08

Ruth rated it:

Read in August, 2008

I wanted to like this book, but it just didn’t work for me. To vault directly to the ending, that in particular let me down. Big fat gimmick. If that was one of the main purposes for the use of the first person plural, then I felt somewhat like the victim of a shaggy dog joke.

At first, the first person plural seemed fine with me, but ultimately I think what it did was, instead of involving me as a participant, as part of the “we,” it distanced me from the book. On reflection, I...more

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07/26/07

Lena rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

I had a love-hate relationship with this book. We got off on the wrong foot to start, since the blurbs had led me to expect the read to be a laugh-filled riot. It does have its funny moments, but the overall tone was much more despairing than one would expect from its copy. In addition, the large cast of characters and first-person plural narration left me grasping for someone to relate to. I kept reading mainly because I enjoyed the references to my hometown.

About half-way throu...more

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03/09/08

Tara Everhart rated it:

Read in March, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

I've been bed-ridden with some mysterious illness for days and, because I "accidentally" lost my copy of Botany of Desire and also because I hate t.v., I borrowed my boyfriend's copy of Then We Came to the End. I more ate it than read it, finishing it in less than 48 hours. I will freely admit that when you make this choice, you open yourself to the possibility of missing choice prose, and just reading for plot points in your bleary-eyed state. This might be possible if you were rea...more I've been bed-ridden with some mysterious illness for days and, because I "accidentally" lost my copy of Botany of Desire and also because I hate t.v., I borrowed my boyfriend's copy of Then We Came to the End. I more ate it than read it, finishing it in less than 48 hours. I will freely admit that when you make this choice, you open yourself to the possibility of missing choice prose, and just reading for plot points in your bleary-eyed state. This might be possible if you were reading Lolita, but in this case, I don't feel too much remorse. ANYWAY, having acknolwedged my bent perspective, I give it a C. The prose and diction are about as sophisticated as J.K. Rowling's. The characters are friendly, familiar stereotypes with mostly predictable physical traits and vices. Occasionally, Joshua Ferris touches on an affecting, inscrutable moment, like Benny's fascination with the totem pole, but it almost seems like he struck gold accidentally. The moments of planned poignancy, like the breast cancer centerpiece, bother me less for their manipulativeness (we all WANT to be emotionally manipulated by a book, don't we?) and more for their clumsiness. The development of a character into full fruit requires more than just giving her both strength and weakness, more than just showing her drinking a bottle of wine and lusting after a commitment-phobic lawyer. I mean, come on. I hope that people are more complex and meaningful than that. What this book lacks most is detail; the attention of the author to detail can convert a stereotype into an uncomfortable reality, through force of our ability to absorb and imagine the circumstance, with their peculiar textures and hues. Moving to a different medium, I just saw 3 Kings, which employs stereotypical characters of the armed forces variety, but because of the emotional availability of Mark Wahlberg and the strange and singular humor of David O. Russell, goes beyond that. When the American soldiers are storming a building, and an Iraqi soldier runs by with an armful of blue jeans, or when Mark Wahlberg suggests the substitute of one more acceptable racial epithet for another, you feel like you are launched into a (skewed) form of reality. I don't think this book ever surpasses the level of the Harry Potter books, which is totally consumable because of its loveable characters and relateable themes, but without poetry, detail, or a unique perspective, remains more pulp fiction than literature.(less)

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10/29/07

Andy rated it:

Read in October, 2007

I came upon this book on one of the book blogs I read after it was short-listed for the National Book Award. The reviews compared Joshua Ferris' debut novel in tone & content to "The Office," the best 30-minute 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 fir...more I came upon this book on one of the book blogs I read after it was short-listed for the National Book Award. The reviews compared Joshua Ferris' debut novel in tone & content to "The Office," the best 30-minute 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 first-person 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 the 21st 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 & 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 totem-pole 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 a 30-page interlude where we lose the first-person 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 every-day 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 9/11, 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 post-script.

All in all, it was worth the read. It was entertaining and well-written, 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. (less)

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08/27/07

Mark rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Read in June, 2008

The first thing to say about this book is that no matter what else I think about the plot, the themes, the point of view, or any other aspect of this novel, it was compulsively readable, which in itself is a mark of how fine a talent Joshua Ferris is.

In some ways, he is plowing the same ground as Douglas Coupland and Dilbert, but without the manic surrealism of the one or the cartoonish brevity of the other. Virtually the entire plot of "Then We Came to the End" takes...more
The first thing to say about this book is that no matter what else I think about the plot, the themes, the point of view, or any other aspect of this novel, it was compulsively readable, which in itself is a mark of how fine a talent Joshua Ferris is.

In some ways, he is plowing the same ground as Douglas Coupland and Dilbert, but without the manic surrealism of the one or the cartoonish brevity of the other. Virtually the entire plot of "Then We Came to the End" takes place in a few floors of a high-rise Chicago office building, home to an advertising and marketing agency. The characters are the copywriters and artists who occupy the cubicles and their bosses, and the obsession of the book is the relationships they have with each other and with their work.

The entire arc of the novel is set against a decline in their business and the drumbeat of layoffs, so that as the book moves along, one after another of the crew exits the building, usually clutching one pathetic box of "useless shit", as the unnamed narrator puts it.

At first, I feared the entire book would be about the personal relationships and habits and put-downs and shifting allegiances of the workers, without any actual discussion of what they did for a living, but in fact some of their advertising work does find its way into the story.

In particular, a shifting set of pro bono campaigns for breast cancer becomes one of their momentary obsessions, and they seem to trace directly back to the much feared and admired boss, who herself has received the diagnosis, but who is more than a little ambivalent about going through with her treatment for it.

The central kernel of the novel concerns her personal journey through the diagnosis and her relationship with a lawyer who she hopes will see her through it, and that one short story within a story almost felt to me as though it was the original writing that Ferris did, and that he then decided to build the rest of his book around it. It has a vulnerability and power that the rest of the book lacks, despite its entertaining tales of everything from the copywriter who was bequeathed an Indian totem pole to the manic employee who may or may not be planning to pull a Columbine on the office after he's laid off.

"When We Came to the End" wants to be a philosophical reflection on the meaninglessness of consumer culture and the art of promoting it, on the ways in which work we don't enjoy or respect consumes our lives anyway, of the myriad ways that the social network of an office triumphs over its actual mission. It isn't quite profound enough for all that, I fear, but the strong storytelling, the vivid characters, and the saving grace of that one cancer story give it enough power to make it a winner.(less)

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08/08/07

Mandy rated it:

Read in October, 2007

OK, I picked up this book because I had read several good reviews of it. And it sounded interesting. I work in an office. This book takes place in an office. I love the TV show "The Office." Some readers of this book compared the two.

Then I read the book. And hated every minute of it. I finished it because I was determined to see why this author got such rave reviews on this, his first novel. Were people reading the same book I was? It wasn't funny. It was tedious. Maybe th...more

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08/05/08

Gail rated it:

bookshelves: 2008, constant-reader

Read in August, 2008

In his first effort, Ferris creates a book that is somewhat like peanuts: you just keep on reading, not actually paying complete attention. Ferris is successful in re-creating the atmosphere of a downward-spiraling workplace, showing the characters' behaviors, motives, and interactions deteriorating along with the company's fortunes.

Ferris also portrays the feelings of a woman facing cancer surgery in a completely believable and moving way. This part of the book is told from a third...more

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02/04/08

Andrea rated it:

Read in February, 2008

recommends it for: Any one who fears they may be alone in their work-related exisential angst.

I think it's telling that so many of our best and most popular artistic endeavors from the past ten years have come from people trying to make sense of the modern day work place. It is also telling that most of these efforts, movies like "Office Space" and T.V. shows like "The Office" for example, include some element of satire or dark humor. I'm still working on my theory as to why that is. It may have something to do with the "quiet desperation" many of us cube dw...more I think it's telling that so many of our best and most popular artistic endeavors from the past ten years have come from people trying to make sense of the modern day work place. It is also telling that most of these efforts, movies like "Office Space" and T.V. shows like "The Office" for example, include some element of satire or dark humor. I'm still working on my theory as to why that is. It may have something to do with the "quiet desperation" many of us cube dwellers feel, and our need to find something to laugh it about, even when most of thing we encounter--indignities minor and major--aren't particularly funny.

"Then We Came to the End" follows the rules of his new "workplace epic" genre, and it, like the other examples, mixes it's satire with sincerity making the characters in the book utterly sympathetic and at the same, time utterly despisable.

One of the main "characters" in fact, isn't any one particular person, but the group of workers. It's the we, the employees, telling you the stories of it's co-workers. (We thought this, We did this, etc.) This perspective gives you the read both that feeling of happy belonging when "you're one the gang" or "part of the family" and the feeling of despair when you so desperately wish you weren't. Any office dweller would be familiar with these feelings, and the author replicates them so beautifully with his narrator.

The thing that most struck me about this book was how often I found myself catching my breath when I came across a passage and reaching for a post-it note to mark it with a "so true!" so I could come back to it later. He manages so often to put his finger on the kinds of frustration and bewilderment we feel about our work that is so hard to express. Even more so, he manages to express the frustration and bewilderment of living in our society and this particular time in history. Here's an example of one of my favorite passages:

Carl was mesmerized. It was the sort of thing, six months ago, that would have sent him right over the edge, seeing these men, these first-generation Americans without much choice in the matter, spend their morning in the dark recess of a loading dock power-spraying the asphalt and the Dumpster--good god, was work so meaningless? Was life so meaningless? It reminded him of when an ad got watered down by a client, and watered down, until everything interesting about the ad disappeared. Carl still had to write the copy for it. The art director still had to put the drop shadow where the drop shadow belonged and the logo in its proper place. That was the process know as, polishing the turd. Those two poor saps hosing down the alleyway there were just doing the same thing. All over America, in fact, people were up and out of their beds today in a continuing effort to polish turds. Sure, for the sake of survival, but more immediately, for the sake of some sadistic manager or shit-brained client whose small imagination and numbingly dumb ideas were bleaching the world of all relevancy and hope.

I should note the whole book is not as bleak as this. In fact, it, unlike many of our offices today, is full of relevancy and hope.

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10/24/07

Aaron rated it:

Read in October, 2007

Trish read this a while ago and suggested it to me at the time. I had so many books on my plate then I sort of ignored the recommendation. But then the book got shortlisted as a National Book Award nominee, so I pushed it ahead of the pile. It's wonderful. I loved it and I think I actually liked it more than Trish did.

The book takes place at the end of the 1990's. The nation is undergoing severe economic drag and companies all over the world are laying off employees right and left. I...more Trish read this a while ago and suggested it to me at the time. I had so many books on my plate then I sort of ignored the recommendation. But then the book got shortlisted as a National Book Award nominee, so I pushed it ahead of the pile. It's wonderful. I loved it and I think I actually liked it more than Trish did.

The book takes place at the end of the 1990's. The nation is undergoing severe economic drag and companies all over the world are laying off employees right and left. In Chicago, the employees of a once-prosperous advertising firm wait quietly, fearing that they might be the next to go. They keep busy in order to look busy so that they can justify their positions. And that's it. That's the plot.

Of course, other things happen. The agency is asked to design a pro-bono ad campaign for a breast cancer organization that appears to be nonexistant. Wagers are placed on who will be die this year. One employee must decide what to do with a sixty-foot totem pole bequeathed to him in a will. Another attempts to convince the co-worker he is having an affair with to have an abortion, thus saving his marriage. Another amuses himself by spending a day speaking only in quotes from The Godfather. They all fear that Tom Mota, recently let-go and prone to outbursts, might come back to work and kill them all.

Everything about this novel works. It's funny and heartbreaking and all too real. Anyone who has worked in corporate America can relate to the doldrums this book describes. To further this, the author chose to present it in the first-person plural tense, a technique that gets tedious in other novels, but works well here, leaving the reader with an inclusive feeling that carries them along. This technique works especially well after a later chapter where the tense shifts, presenting a startling portrait of how to cope with illness, told strictly from one character's point of view. The shift is jarring. It almost kicks you in the head.

I say this all the time, but: This is the best novel I've read all year. I'm rooting for this wildly-talented new author to go home with a National Book Award to his credit.

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07/20/08

Alison rated it:

bookshelves: contemporaryfiction

Read in August, 2008

recommends it for: people who believe in the importance of the individual, over the group

I have too much of this book marked up to ever be able to catalog all the good parts here.

"What I'm trying to get at here is that I'M NOT SURE ANY OF US KNOWS just how far we have removed ourselves not only from nature but from the natural conditions of life that have prevaliled for centuries and have forced men to the extreme limits of their physical capacity in order simply to feed, clothe, and otherwise provide for their families, sending them every night to a sweet exhausted...more

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04/24/08

Gregory rated it:

Read in December, 2007

“Do you realize how insane we’ve all become?”

In the post-Dilbert 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 top 5 fiction book of 2007). Office ennui is relatively easy to portray because, let’s be honest, anyone who has ev...more “Do you realize how insane we’ve all become?”

In the post-Dilbert 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 top 5 fiction book of 2007). Office ennui is relatively easy to portray because, let’s 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 inter-office relations and how it affects us as human beings, smoothly wrapping it all up in a bitterly funny package.

The cubicle-dwellers 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 watery-world dwellers dispelling the hypos with a maniacal peg-leg.” 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. It’s the ultimate love-hate relationship. So when lay-offs come calling, it brings out the best and, more often, the worst in the employees. They are often well-intentioned 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 co-workers try not to get the stain of association on them.

Ferris captures the complex, wide-ranging spectrum of emotions and attitudes that fester in the workplace. Jealousy, friendship, annoyance, and love – all existing hand in hand and ever-present, even when it seems like they would contradict each other. When a co-worker 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 chair-swapping 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 – re-touch the photo of a young girl in a missing poster because they think people will be more likely to respond if she doesn’t look so pale and her smile isn’t 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, they’ve missed it completely), but I for one thoroughly enjoyed this book and have been feverishly recommending it since I finished it yesterday. And I can’t wait to see what the promising Ferris comes up with next.

Grade: A-(less)

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04/06/08

Dup rated it:

recommended to Dup by: Willis, Pete, Blade

We first saw the reviews referring to it as an existential version of The Office which peaked our interest because it combined two things that we loved and that described our lives. Then Pete and Blade emailed us to say that Willis had recommended it to them and they loved it and had both independently agreed that it was something that Dup would love. We heard Dup went over to brunch with Willis and Lia and borrowed Willis's copy. He loved it and read it a week and then passed it on to LaKetch...more

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02/11/08

Christopher rated it:

recommended to Christopher by: The New York Times
recommends it for: Anyone

this one takes a unique turn in narrative point of view that I found fascinating. The story is told from the first person perspective of an employee at a top Chicago ad agency. This is in the time leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, during the crash of the internet boom, when lots of creative types are losing jobs. Yet the narrator never mentions "I." We learn absolutely nothing about him or her. The story is all about the other employees, and the narrator uses the collective "we" ...more

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08/02/07

Emily rated it:

Read in December, 2007

recommends it for: everyone

I guess the first thing that should be said is that I think the book deserves the attention it got this year as much as any book ever does, and I think it's one for posterity. I wish I could give it 4.5 stars, but since you can't do that, it's gotta be 4 for me, because (a) I thought some of the beginning parts were weak and (b) some of the characters took up far more of the plot than they should have, probably to make the book more humorous. (Laugh rate is about 1 per every 5-10 pages.)
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10/23/08

Nancy rated it:

bookshelves: adult-fiction

Read in November, 2008

Possibly it's not fair that I rate this book, as I was unable to finish it. I enjoyed it at first, but as the pages wore on (and on, and on) with nothing in them of forward motion or tension (I understood there was no plot and was willing to go with that, but I needed something, something -- please!), I lost interest. Another problem was that there was only one character (the woman boss with cancer) to care about at all. Even my own many years' experience of cubicle-ville failed to help me stay ...more

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