Sean’s Blog

Then We Came To The End - Joshua Ferris

Then We Came To The End is a book about work.  It was sold as “Hilarious” “Witty” etc… and it was all those things.  But it also struck me as a very sad book.  A book where jokes go to far and pettiness is the rule.  Which is not to say that it didn’t ring true to someone who has spent the last six years as a member of the cubicle nation.

The book follows a group of ad designers through the late nineties and early aughts (Total Aside: I know that aught as in 00 is the correct way to refer to the decade before 2010, but does anybody actually say that?  I don’t know that I’ve ever heard it.  If nobody says it how do we refer to it?  The zeros? Zeds? I can’t be the only one that has run across this problem before) as they work and fear for there jobs.

It chronicles the pranks (taping sushi behind a bookcase was a personal favorite), the kindnesses (designing and putting up billboards for a coworker with a missing child), the petty jealousies (sharpying FAG on the wall of a coworker who came up with the used idea for a campaign) and fears (hunting down office chairs that have been switched so many times as to be untraceable, because the office manager is on a rampage).

I liked this book a lot and caught myself squirming a little when you recognize something that you have done being played out in a less then positive light.  Anybody that has spent a good amount of time in an office will see some of themselves or someone they know in parts of this book.  It is true, that we spend more time with these strangers at work then with our own families and in someways they become surrogates for our families in both the good and bad ways.

A note for all English geeks (ie lit majors, not nerds from britain): Except for a small part in the middle, the entire story is narrated in the first person plural.   The only story I know that is told in this tense is Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily. Jess once called her english professor out on first person plural being an uncommon narrator (ie he said it was not uncommon) and he couldn’t name another story tod from that point of view.  All that being said, what may initially seem as narrative contrivance, actually ends up working very well for the story and how it is told by a decentralized group.