Then We Came to the End: A Novel

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.

This is a sketch - painfully dragged out to novel length. Should have "come to an end" somewhere around page 50. I hung in until about page 100, and then threw in the towel. Some friends told me that it got better after that - but who cares?