Then We Came to the End: A Novel

I came to the book after reading an excellent short story by Ferris
in the New Yorker ("The Dinner Party"). However, it took me a while
after I finished it to decide whether I liked this novel. The use of the first
person plural is different, but I don't think that is what makes the book really
unusual. Inconsequential stories of everyday office life are transformed into
prose that is in places poetic, and in others crass. The mundane nature
of the material he works with made me miss the careful construction of the
story, and the not so hidden subtext.

As other reviewers have noted, the novel really does come together
in the last 20 pages. However, even after I finished reading it, I kept thinking back
about the book - not the specific stories perhaps, but rather the
main ideas and feelings: how the existential fear of losing a job (and in most cases in
the novel, the character's identity along with it), is reflected in the mundane jokes and
worries over being found out with a stolen chair. In the end, I thought it
worked very well, but I can see how others may be disappointed.

I read the reviews on the cover and they all raved, so I bought it. I barely got through the 100 page rule - i.e. you have to read 100 pages minus your age. It's about an advertising agency and the people in that agency so I'm not sure why it would be interesting and it's not. It's so boring and vacuous i did not complete it and can't believe the fuss.

However Josh Ferris is a good writer but Wim Wenders is a good movie maker and his movies are still boring. I can't recommend it.

Finished this engrossing novel this afternoon. Still a little emotionally impaired by it. Still jangled by its compassion and humor. Still reeling with the author's powers of observation.
Add me to the ranks of confused-by-the-negative-reviews. I'm sorry, but this is a page-turner, folks. "Not get into it"? This layered story lays bare much, much more than office ennui. This is a novel about inner lives, dreams private and public, and how we, social animals all, connect and disconnect and sometimes connect again. People say the characters are thinly drawn? Dickens-esque in its characterization, I'd say. It's also very funny.

A good book for me is one that you won't forget. I won't forget this one. One of the characters tries to get through a day by quoting lines from The Godfather - that's laugh-out-loud funny. The mix of that level of humor with a topic as serious as cancer is very well done, as is the ending of the book. Anyone that has ever worked in the cube world will like it - you will recognize some of the characters as being like people you have known, only amplified a million times.

The title of the book is taken from Don DeLillo's first novel, Americana, which is (not surprisingly) also an art-house novel about an advertising executive and his wacky, post-modern relationships with his co-workers. It's from the first line: "Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year."

Ferris strikes me more as a theorist than an artist. Reading this book felt like an intellectual exercise, as though it was written to be an extended literary device, a form of self-satisfying academic experimentation, not a story.

I am sure there are people who enjoy reading books that are constructed as intellectual exercises, but I don't. In my experience, these are the same people who sneer at the very idea of deigning to enjoy a good story. I prefer novels that are about feeling and experience. This one isn't.