My Favorite Books of 2007: Then We Came to the End

NOTE: I have, recently, been blogging some of my favorite books of 2006. Inspired by the paperback release of one of my favorites of 2007, I’m going to jump ahead a bit.

I didn’t really want to like Then We Came to the End. It’s set in an office much like the one in which I worked for five years, and it seemed like it would be the kind of book that, had I applied myself—or, like, had I had the idea—I could have written. Well, I was wrong: I could not have written this book. It’s brilliant, and my own baby steps into fiction (one story [ahem.] published in a magazine for girls, a tidy little pile of rejection letters with great potential for future growth) demonstrate a puny fraction of the skill and craft on display in Joshua Ferris’s debut.

You may have heard of this book. You may know that it was a finalist for the National Book Award, but, if you know anything at all about this book, you probably know that it’s narrated, mostly, in the second-person plural.* This is a bold move, an aesthetic maneuver at which it would have been so very easy to fail. Ferris not only pulls it off, he makes it sing. His “we” captures the sort of collective consciousness that grows among corporate wage slaves, but that doesn’t mean that his narrator moves through the novel as a lumpen mass. His narrator is more like a guardian angel of the cubicles, soaring above the oatmeal-colored carpet, possessing an awareness of its own but also able to zoom in and out of individual cubicles and the minds of their inhabitants. It’s kind of exhilarating, really.

And then it stops. The second part of the novel is rendered in traditional third-person omniscient. It’s hard for me to describe how upset I was about this transition. I felt betrayed. I thought that such a risky maneuver required total commitment to make it work, and I was disappointed that Ferris had lost his nerve. I also missed the collective narrator. It was funny and cannily observant and I liked it.

But I kept reading, and I am so glad I did. By the novel’s close, everything that Ferris has done makes sense. That middle section turns out to be the story of two characters, the one being written about and the one doing the writing. In restoring the possibility of individuality for these two characters, Ferris suggests that all his characters might regain their humanity—or, perhaps, that they never really lost it in the first place. This is a novel that will earn rueful laughs from office workers (and office veterans), but its appeal goes far beyond that demographic. This is a novel about people, and it’s wonderful.

* And at this point I can’t seem to help but mention that I just finished an advance readers’ copy of a strikingly similar book—set in an office, collective narrator—coming out this May. I’m not suggesting that the author of this forthcoming book copped his moves from Ferris. I would imagine that he was working on his manuscript well before Ferris’s book was published, and it’s impossible not to speculate about his state of mind when he first got wind of Then We Came to the End. Was it like seeing his doppelganger crossing the street? Did it fill him with dread? Did he call his editor immediately, or did he stop taking her calls for weeks? I don’t know, of course, but I do feel kind of sorry for the guy.