Then We Came to the End: A Novel

Very rarely does a book inspire me to laugh out loud, much less gasp or start tearing up. This book did all of that (which led to some embarrassing moments on the train) and more. I read it several months ago and still think about it at least once a day - although I do work in an office in Chicago that is facing layoffs, so the parallels are undeniable. But I don't want to sell Ferris short - the book would be brilliant even if it didn't resonate with my real life.

The book's real triumph for me (and perhaps the reason some people are so put off by it) is that so much happens by inference, subtext, and implication. With the single (startling, unexpected, heartbreaking) exception, we never really get inside the perspective of the characters. We see their actions, listen to their words, hear their perspective from them, but their true inner life is the central mystery of the book, much as those we spend our time with are truly unknowable. So those moments when truth bubbles to the surface, when we discover something truly personal about a character, are like shocking twists in a suspense film.

When describing this book, I often say it's like Catch-22 in an office, which isn't really fair, but does get at some central things about the book. First off, the characters' unknowability, then the sheer size of the cast, and the time-jumping nature of the narrative, which goes forward and back and around and through the same central time period. But the thing that both books have at their center is a bruised but extremely loving and generous heart that cloaks itself in jokes and distance because the truth is simply too much to bear. I love this book.

The clever and sophisticated people in this novel begin by acting in petty and childlike ways. They are a group of workers in an advertising agency in Chicago.. Augusten Burroughs's "Sellevision" and Scott Adam's Dilbert strip come to mind. The book is often mordantly funny, although it includes the murder of a child, a death from cancer, a death in military action, and bouts of depression and mental illness. These actions are effectively counterpointed with concerns about such matters as ownership of a chair or decorating an office cubicle.
As the story goes on the characters mature and come to respect each other. I had a vague feeling that there's a deep moral in there somewhere, if I was smart enough to understand it. It uses some narrative gimmicks of the kind I usually dislike, but which are used so effectively that I was drawn in. One schtick is to use the first person plural as a point of view. A large part of the story is told by "we" and not until the last sentence is the reader told who "we' is. Other parts are POV of separate characters, and then, towards the end on of the characters reads from the novel he has been writing about the others. It's complicated but it works.

This is one of the best books I've read in years: really unique, funny, and sad. I was drawn to it initially because of the brilliant cover design - fantastic work by designer Jamie Keenan by the way, and too bad the paperback editions don't reuse the same design - and lucked out judging this great book by its cover.

I think the strongest points of this book are the humorous sections, and the weakest are the drama sections. This is not to say I didn't care about the characters and their sometimes sad, futile work situations. But, there are some stretches of this book that stretched a little too far and I fell my attention wander a bit. Good book, but not the best.

A truly great book and a very very talented writer. You'll enjoy every minute of it.