** spoiler alert ** 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.