Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

"I just wanted to say to him, 'Oh my god, Chris - you don't work here anymore. Give the fund-raiser ads up. Leave the building. Proofread your own frickin' resume!['] But my God," she said, "he wouldn't stop talking. He says to me, 'Can you believe I can't stop working in my head? I keep working and working and working - isn't that sick and twisted?' Well, yeah. Yeah it's sick and twisted. You don't work here anymore! But I didn't say that. I was trying to be nice. I do try to be nice sometimes. So even though he didn't know my name I went on proofreading his stupid resume, which had so many mistakes. How did we ever hire that guy to be a copywriter? I'm pointing them out to him, all these misspellings and typos and things, when he says, totally out of the blue - I mean, I have no idea where this comes from. I know something's wrong, though, because he's not talking talking talking, he's just looking at me, so I look up from his resume and I says [sic], 'What?' and he says, 'It'll happen to you, too, you know. Don't think that it won't.' And I says, 'What will happen to me?' 'Getting fired,' he says.

-Then We Came to the End

Then We Came to the End tells the story of a group of people working at a Chicago advertising agency whose glory days have come and gone. With only one pro bono campaign to work on, they have a lot of free time nowadays. Time to gossip and tell stories, as long as the boss is out of sight. And, more importantly, time to manufacture a sense of busyness and importance; an illusion of being a valuable member of the team instead of someone terrified that he'll be the next to "walk Spanish" - popular office parlance for getting fired.

There's no one main character in Then We Came to the End; rather, there's a company of players that the reader comes to know in the same shallow and yet sometimes oddly specific ways that one might know a coworker. You know what she has for lunch every day, maybe, but not what she's like for the 2/3 (hopefully) of her day that she's not at work. The entire story is told in the first person plural, creating the illusion that you're part of the team - this is our office, these are our coworkers, and these are our shared stories and aspirations and fears. They're not, of course, but they're close enough that anyone in the working world will recognize them.

I've heard Then We Came to the End described as a funny book - a literary version of The Office. I don't think funny is the right word (with apologies to Nick Hornby, who describes it as such in his blurb), but it's certainly entertaining. The style is breezy and conversational - with the exception of a rather different middle passage that will make sense by the book's end - and it's easy to get wrapped up in the minutiae of this world. I particularly admired Ferris's ability to transition from an event to a character's retelling of that event to a coworker (such as Marcia's story about Chris, part of which is included as the excerpt at the top of this post). Ferris juggles a lot in terms of characters, subplots, and chronology, but everything stays aloft and I thought things came to a fitting conclusion.

Next up: About halfway through Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down. I have mixed feelings about it so far, so it will be interesting to see how it progresses.