Fiction Mondays: "Then We Came to the End"

Lately, it's rare for me to get through a novel in a matter of days; between working full time, writing for a local magazine, and keeping up with my own fiction and plays, my schedule and level of energy just doesn't always lend itself to getting through a book quickly (see: The Savage Detectives). But last week, in probably about four days, I burned through Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, a hilarious and surprisingly affecting novel about workers in an ad agency.

When I bought the book, I was worried I would grow tired of its narrative style, written in the first person collective, but I don't think it would have been as amazing if it had a more traditional voice. The book makes you, the reader, complicit in the actions of the narrators, and this at times can be an uncomfortable feeling, as they don't always act in a way you agree with. They gossip, they watch a grieving woman on her lunch break, they judge everyone around them. But they also, despite the fact that they lack names, faces, or any other characterization, manage to produce some real insight into the nature of work and all of the human interactions a day job can bring you.

There's a middle section that steps out of this voice, where Lynn, the narrators' boss, tries to figure out the best way to spend her last night before surgery to remove breast cancer. The author called it the "emotional core" of the novel, and I agree: to step, for just a few pages, out of the office and its trivialities and to exist with one character facing the possibility of death changes the way you read the second half. I think it changes the book from a dark comedy to a kind of tragedy, and towards the end of the book, when a character who is being let go from the agency talks about how they're all losing their minds, it makes more sense because of the closeness of death in the middle section.

I don't want, in reviewing this book, to give too much away, but I have to mention Tom Mota. He's one of the first characters we really get to know, and he is central throughout the entire book as something of an angel of chaos, sending long cryptic e-mails and appearing in an insane, dark, funny scene that serves as the novel's climax. From the first chapter, we know that he is fired, and that he probably is a little insane. He begins to wear three company polo shirts, layered over one another, around the office, and when they ask him what he's doing, his response is, "You don't know what's in my heart." That was the line from the book that resonated with me, and I think about it a lot while I'm at work. I am surrounded by so many people, who I see every day, who I complain about the job with, who I make small talk, but it is true that they don't know what's in my heart, any more than I know what is in theirs.