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Joshua Ferris does a solid for GenX: a book review in margin notes

by Tamara on April 30, 2008

AND THEN WE CAME TO AN END by Joshua Ferris

…arch, smarmy, hilarious (a laugh a page, at least)

…totally relatable (Ferris must be talking about the place where I used to work in Chicago! Or maybe a blend of my workplace and my spouse’s)

…and in some places downright poignant

…in other places, excruciating

…a fascinating train-wreck of a read

…often made me sad and a little queasy. Takes me back to my first corporate job (in publishing). I got the same reaction reading this that I get when I watch The Office (TV) or the movie, Office Space. Funny, charming, but a little too real in its weirdness

…descriptions of the workplace setting itself: amazingly authentic.

• the second-rate attempt to coax creativity with odd furniture
• the printing queue issues
• the *&^$%ing double meetings (ginormous waste of time, ugh)
• the way decent people use email and tech to bully others without realizing their cruelties
• the odd attempts at finding community at the workplace through attempts like quasi-Bible study sessions
• the constant cubicle gossip and groupie-ness surrounding it
• the ongoing riff about chair ownership and serial numbers…so spot-on, it’s scary

…good insights into how small groups try to relate in a “trapped” environment—how people find ways to care for each other when, in fact, they’d never choose each other outside the workplace

…people who don’t work in white collar or tech jobs don’t understand how much it’s like voluntarily committing yourself—to prison, or to the asylum, or to the circus; take your pick. Good pay and benefits don’t come without a price

…some readers will hate the nonlinear structure of the narrative. I found it a little fatiguing myself, and I’m usually pretty supportive of alternative storytelling strategies. …Flip side: there was a sense of eminent “doom” for all the characters, that they knew what was coming, and we, living in 2008, know what is coming for them, so it’s not necessary or even valid to write this book from A to B

…brilliant, thoughtful use of first person plural, from so many different angles. Genius!

…the point of the book: capture the social miasma of a busted industry through the eyes of the people who lost.

pontification:START

This book humanizes all the rich-rich folks that fell through the cracks during the dotcom bust.

Listen, we’ve all done it: we’ve all rolled our eyes and found it hard to sympathize with people who were doing (what we think to have been) very little in (what we imagined were) corner offices filled with mahogany furnture, all of it for a lot of money, only to be stripped of their livelihoods.

We cried “boo hoo” with crocodile tears without imagining these human lives in metaphor: consider, if you will, the appendages of Daddy Long Legs, how some little kids will pull only one leg off per day, to make the power trip last that much longer, and you approximate the kind of psychic pain these people absorbed while keeping their heads and their student loan payments above water.

The truth is that these folks also bled, suffered from mental and physical illnesses, were lonely or outcast. They also possessed (mostly) likeable flaws and idiosyncracies and had all the same concerns, vulnerabilities, and fears that blue-collar and nontech working people had at the same time. Management was/is just as vulnerable as the office grunts from an emotional or psychological POV, as well.

Ferris built his characters to represent real people at a real time in American history. Real people who were turned into the Other by the masses. The socioeconomic catastrophe of the time, in reality, grew into a class thing as well; we all contributed, in that sense, to their Fall.

Ferris’s book works hard, if mostly in subtext, to show how divisive it was/is to judge people based solely on presumptions about their incomes and work ethics, which didn’t/don’t always match with reality.

pontification:END

…so-o-o glad to hear a GenX voice out there in the literary wilderness. Batten down the hatches, Boomers; the wave is coming.

-30-

TKS

PS/How interesting that I would download and read this book on my Kindle.

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