I read ' Franny & Zooey' when I was right out of college and just starting my life as a post-grad in the city, and it really spoke to me. It's funny how certain books just come along at exactly the right time in your life. On Then We Came to the End's back cover, an author named Jim Shepard writes, "The real revelation here is how moving it all becomes. What excerpt is read? Part of the breast-cancer story from pages 196-230. He gives his least memorable character the task of reuniting all the unlikable folks from the office, six years after their end, for a reading of his novel. How do we know he knows it? Because after another 150 or so pages of cleverly describing office luncheons and chair-swapping capers and employee layoffs, Ferris comes back to it.
These 30 pages are the novel's best pages, and Ferris (or his editor) knows it. From to 230, this novel transcends itself and its pedigree. All the zaniness and shallowness of the novel's first half are temporarily forgotten while Ferris does an exceptionally good job of writing. Why kill off these innocuous folks? Who knows? maybe to appear serious?īut there's a piece of writing, an accomplishment of actual storytelling, that begins on and treats the pathos of a person recently diagnosed with breast cancer. At the very end of the novel - six years later - we learn that a number of the officemates in fact died. One of the great discoveries that happens in this novel, over the next 384 pages, is that persons do, as it turns out, die. On, we get this insight: "Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die."
It's neither annoying nor enticing - but it seems to want to provoke commentary. It's written in the first-person plural, which is about the extent of its original contributions. Then We Came to the End begins like a sequel to the movie "Office Space", written by Chuck Palahniuk. It fails for the reason so many MFA-workshopped novels fail: It's a technically proficient piece of writing about unserious folks discovering truths that serious persons generally know long before their 30th birthdays. Oh, it's witty and flippant and clever and occasionally funny, but ultimately it's not enjoyable. Truth is, but for 34 pages in the middle of this novel, I didn't enjoy Ferris's debut at all. Because so many of the GoodReads folks are participants or graduates of MFA programs, and because Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is so obviously the product of an MFA program, I thought to hedge and give this book three stars.
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