The Book Tower

Then we Came to the End by Joshua Ferris gave me one of the strangest reading experiences of recent years. My reaction to the book slid from liking it to hating it in only three stages.

The novel begins as a well written and amusing study of office life in Chicago. The style reminded me very much of Joseph Heller, especially his novel Something Happened, which many fans prefer to the more celebrated Catch 22. A sort of White Album vs Sgt Pepper debate. Anyway, Then we Came to the End starts promisingly and I liked it a lot, although there was the nagging doubt at the back of my mind that the book was far too Hellerish. So a word of advice to anyone who’s not a fan of Joseph Heller: don’t read this book.

The first section is quite lengthy and begins to grate because the story doesn’t really go anywhere; there’s no real story at all – simply a series of dryly observed views of office life overshadowed by the depression of the workers facing the onset on redundancy. There’s funny passages – very funny in places – and some excellent dialogue that captures the pettiness and absurdity of office life. Ever stolen somebody’s chair after they’ve left the job because it’s a far better chair than your own? You’ll be hesitating before doing it again after reading this novel.

Ferris does something interesting by changing gear for what I’m calling the second section. This is an althogether more sombre series of chapters following a single character – the office manager as she faces breast cancer. I found it an outstanding piece of writing that surprised me in its sadness and insight. Unfortunately once this section is over Ferris returns for act three and he appears to have lost interest in proceedings. The last 150 pages or so of the novel was one of the biggest struggles I’ve had with a book for a long time. I didn’t want to trawl through any more of the Hellerish style and Ferris appeared to have lost focus. The novel became more of a drag than getting up for work on a winter Monday morning.

So a curate’s egg; funny and incisive but a little too close to the style of a classic author, and really just too long. Where are editors when you need them? At half its length this would have been much better, possibly an outstanding debut novel, but it’s ultimately boring and repetetive, undoing all the good done in the early chapters. And very overrated.