Joshua Ferris' Office Novel

The Cubicle Workers in Then We Came to the End

Aug 15, 2007 Matthew McMain Martin

Review of Joshua Ferris' book "Then We Came to the End" with references to Joseph Heller, The Office, and Office Space, all about lousy cubicle jobs.

The Best New American Voices series is an annual crapshoot where not knowing what you’re getting is most of the attraction. In the series, the best of the new American voices are the voices that are actually new, though unfortunately most of the new voices are just echoes, reiterating the short stories found better written in literary magazines the country over.

Some are actually new, though: Joshua Ferris’ entry “More Abandon” from the 2005 BNAM installment was such a work, a gem of advertising agency-based infatuation and anomy.

Then We Came to the End

Now, two years later, here’s his novel, which widens the scope of his story to include the entirety of the ad agency’s characters, almost all of whom hate the banality of their jobs, but wouldn’t dream of leaving them.

The office workers' lives are comprised of the tiniest victories and defeats, dramas borne of drop-cap shadowing, font selection, and interoffice gossip. They spend most of their on-clock time gossiping, in fact, meeting in groups to hear the latest skinny. Alone, they happily contemplate their own rises to fall and possibilities of future bankruptcy, all the while feeling wholly entitled to the fruits of their labors. “We were delighted to have our jobs. We bitched about them constantly,” the unnamed narrator writes, speaking in the first-person plural of company mentality.

The Lives of the Office

Ferris’ advertising reps (called in industryspeak “creatives”) find themselves trapped in a fugue of ambivalence: they’re alienated from their lives and disassociated from their jobs, facing both with a smirking resignation, a continually mocked acceptance of their nine-to-five. They worry their jobs are deadening them, but find no recourse, nor alternative, even as they begin to be fired one by one. They realize their entire function is “polishing the turd,” turning crap by any other name into something desirable to preselected target audiences. Even as they admit “work is everything,” they build whole occupations on not working, doing whatever they can to delay deadlines. They’re mad enough to know what they’re doing is useless, but powerless to stop coming up with advertising copy to sell its usefulness—sick at themselves for their command of “that cloying and unctuous language, that false speak.” They’re negated by the office, left sexless, loveless, joyless, feckless, and unbearably comfortable. “We were fractious and overpaid…we had rich, visceral memories of dull, interminable hours,” the narrator says.

Along the way, coworkers steal depression pills from each other, battle over the ownership of chairs, and deny their clandestine romances. The office is filled with characters, such as Tom, a manic, Emerson-spouting loose cannon who shows his nonconformity by wearing several company uniforms at the same time.

Comparison

Then We Came to the End has already been called “the Catch-22 of the business world” by author Jim Shepard, and though that book was already written (Something Happened, by the same author), Ferris’ work possesses the same daft madness of Catch-22, its characters just as hapless as Yossarian and crew. Like Catch-22, End is framed around a series of workers’ catty interactions, each of which is a veiled (or unveiled) competition of the ever-shifting office caste. To Ferris’ credit, the reader comes to covet the newest bit of office tabloid, wondering what’s happened to whom this time. As dead-on as Office Space or The Office (either country), Ferris mines the new milieu of stifling offices and their wealth of potential for hilarity much in the way of Douglas Coupland's JPod or Max Barry's Company.

No Mere Goofs

Which isn’t to say that the novel is mere goofs—the central plot hinges on a breast cancer campaign the workers’ boss won’t deign to admit is a personal favor, as she hides her own affliction. And for all their jokes and camaraderie, all that really remains after the workers’ chats is their distance, their unspoken animosities and judgments: unbearable tension. The workers exist mostly in pretense, desperately trying to hide the details of their personal lives—lost children, unwanted children, and messy divorces—that inevitably leak through anyway, providing fodder for more petty gossip.

Then We Came to the End should be painfully relatable yet therapeutic for those readers stuck themselves in cubicles, a guilty read kept hidden in desk drawers behind piles of mundane protocols.

The copyright of the article Joshua Ferris' Office Novel in American Fiction is owned by Matthew McMain Martin. Permission to republish Joshua Ferris' Office Novel in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Then We Came to the End