Then We Came to the End: A Novel

SUMMARY:

No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week. "Not too many authors have written the Great American Office Novel. Joseph Heller did it in Something Happened (the one book of his to rival Catch-22). And Nicholson Baker pulled it off in zanily fastidious fashion in The Mezzanine. To their ranks should be added Joshua Ferris, whose THEN WE CAME TO THE END feels like a ready made classic of the genre. . . . A truly affecting novel about work, trust, love,and loneliness." -Seattle Times "A masterwork of pitch and tone. . . . Ferris brilliantly captures the fish-bowl quality of contemporary office life." -The New Yorker

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this wildly funny debut from former ad man Ferris, a

group of copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the

end of the '90s boom. Indignation rises over the rightful owner of a

particularly coveted chair ("We felt deceived"). Gonzo e-mailer Tom Mota

quotes Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the midst of his tirades,

desperately trying to retain a shred of integrity at a job that requires a

ruthless attention to what will make people buy things. Jealousy toward the

aloof and "inscrutable" middle manager Joe Pope spins out of control.

Copywriter Chris Yop secretly returns to the office after he's laid off to

prove his worth. Rumors that supervisor Lynn Mason has breast cancer inspire

blood lust, remorse, compassion. Ferris has the downward-spiraling office down

cold, and his use of the narrative "we" brilliantly conveys the collective

fear, pettiness, idiocy and also humanity of high-level office drones as

anxiety rises to a fever pitch. Only once does Ferris shift from the first

person plural (for an extended fugue on Lynn's realization that she may be

ill), and the perspective feels natural throughout. At once delightfully

freakish and entirely credible, Ferris's cast makes a real impression.

(Mar.)

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