Friends and Pronouns

Last night I wound up staying up until three o’clock in the morning to read the last hundred and eighty pages of a book I had been reading for a week or so. That book is called Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. The decision to stay up and read was a good one for three reasons.

1. The book was tremendous.

2. At one point, the man who once cost our softball team the championship with four errors in one inning IM’d me to tell me his new favorite song is by Miley Cyrus, and

3. Our Friend Blake IM’d me to tell me some of the rhymes he’s been working on, including a gem about exposing prose and staying poetic.

All in all, good decision by me to stay up. And since few books have ever made me stay up to the bitter end like this, and probably none with a similar distance to the goal line starting out (wait, one) – I figured I’d toss a recommendation/review out there on the airwaves.

So: the book is called Then We Came to the End, and it comes outfitted with one of those gimmicks that gets talked about but then isn’t really gimmicky in the book. This one’s is that it is told almost entirely in the first person plural (the first line is “We were fractious and overpaid”). At no point is there a single narrative persona chiseled out: the “we” speaks for the dozen or so employees at a Chicago ad agency during the economic downturn that took up the first couple quarters of fiscal 2001. There is downsizing; there are relatively mundane subplots; and there is commentary, which is snarkily funny and endearingly small. Most reviews I’ve seen of this novel mention one or two examples of these antipodes of office conversation; my personal favorite is that the office’s loser, a guy who calls his trips to the men’s room “a visit with Mr. B.”, gets tasked with an ad project for breast cancer awareness and gets some help from his father.

“Jim Jackers spent his lunch hour in the waiting room of the oncology ward at Rush-Presbyterian surrounded by some very sick people…Jim’s father sold medical equipment, and when Jim told him of his recent project, he contacted an oncologist on his son’s behalf and told Jim that the doctor was willing to speak with him. Jim wanted to talk to the doctor in the hopes of gaining the insight necessary to arrive at the winning concept for the fund-raiser, but at that particular hour the doctor proved too busy to spare any time, so Jim thanked the nurse and returned to his office.” (Ferris, 164)

We would all do well to remember that even these, the least of even our literary brethren, have fathers doing more than they can to give their sons more than they deserve.

That passage is dead on in its capture of what exactly it sounds like to be told a story, and the entire novel (almost) works that way. It’s been noted that it is difficult to really root against first-person narrators, even skeezoids like Humbert Humbert and Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Hearing them talk right to you can make you feel like a co-conspirator. Ferris’s “we” strategy goes one further: these people seem like your friends. Coworkers are more like book characters than, say, your parents are, so it is a good fit. It is also a task totally within the powers of the novel, to make us know these imaginary men and women as much as we know our coworkers. A while ago, I said some stuff about Emmas, and looking back, I don’t super know what I was talking about. However: one of the points I think I was trying to make there seem to be some novels that take a certain thing as their point of inquiry, and others that seem to have more high-concept or supposedly artistic points to make (Nabokov called Madame Bovary “prose doing what poetry is supposed to do”). Then We Came to the End is a “certain-thing” sort of novel: it throws life in an office under its merry observation apparatus and provides an unsentimental appreciation, a thing that I think is rare but to be valued. This is kind of vague; I do not want to talk about what the (almost) end of the novel is like, when it presents its sort of summing-up of what it has appreciated, because I think that would ruin the slow realization, at the end of the book, of just what end we’ve come to, and that by itself is worth the reading of the book.

Twice up there I said “(almost)”, because not quite all the book is told like a water cooler story, and there is a kind of epilogue after the stunning and beautiful close to the book proper. As if this book, providing me with imaginary friends at three in the morning, needed more for me to love it: the epilogue features the book’s nerdy writer character having achieved success and giving a reading…of the one non-water-cooler-story part of the book, which we have read about a hundred and fifty pages ago. Talk about my wheelhouse! That was mostly just a cherry on top, but I thought it warranted mentioning.

This book was on my radar as part of my plan to read all ten of the Times’s picks for best books of 2007, but it was also recommended by my ex-boss at the bookstore where I work. Since I have declared a cap on pages of unread book allowed in my house, finishing it clears up some room with which I am going to pick up The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud, a book that is also about like in These Postmillennial United States, and which was recommended by an ex-professor of mine at the college where I studied. If you don’t think I am trying to come up with some kind of Recommendation Bracket to make noise about for the coming months, well then, have we actually met?

Up (possibly tomorrow): a belated forum on Papercuts, romance, and teh litz.