Reviewed by Steve Himmer
5.2.07

After being fired from the ad agency dissected in Joshua Ferris’ debut novel Then We Came to the End, copywriter Chris Yop appears at a meeting he no longer needs to attend. Asked by his former colleagues what he’s doing there, Yop replies,“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t go home, not yet. It doesn’t feel right….This meeting’s been on my calendar for a long time.”

Days later, still lingering by the copy machine, Yop asks a remaining employee to present some of his ideas in a meeting because, as he puts it, “the problem is not that I’m insane. The problem is I don’t officially work here anymore.

Like Melville’s Bartleby a century a half earlier, Chris Yop is reluctant to leave the workplace he depends on for his identity. Whereas Bartleby preferred not to do any work, however, content just to occupy the space of his office, Yop is eager, even desperate, to be more than a chair-filler. In fact, his chair becomes the novel’s most complex and potent metaphor, resulting in a rare scene of individual identity reasserting itself as the castoff copywriter finally destroying the object he has both blamed for his misfortune through a hilarious subplot concerning purloined office furniture and its serial numbers. This reassertion of individual will is made all the more satisfying because most of the novel’s characters never attain such humanizing moments themselves.

Then We Came to the End charts the end days of a Chicago ad agency caught in the burst new-economy bubble. As the firm’s employees watch those around them laid off and wait for their own walking papers, they obsess over one another’s behavior and the secrets co-workers may or may not be keeping. In Ferris’ descriptions of entire floors closed off and abandoned as the firm shrinks, and of workers clinging to a futile illusion of business as usual, there’s a tragic and palpable hubris. The novel is rich with stirring images, as in this scene of after-hours dormancy:

After everyone went home for the night, after we all fell asleep and the city dimmed, Oldies continued to play inside the abandoned office. Picture it—only a parallelogram of light in the doorway. A happy tune by the Drifters issuing in the dark at two, three o’clock in the morning, when elsewhere murders were taking place, drug deals, unspeakable assaults.

Like the apocryphal story of Nero fiddling as Rome burns, nostalgic Oldies play with no one to listen and herald the assumed safety and detachment of those “inside”—even while they are sleeping at home—from the dangerous world beyond the American office.

The novel’s great triumph is its collective voice, and narration delivered in a first-person plural that manages to avoid both gimmickry and sentimentality. Characters gracefully emerge from and recede into the group consciousness as the events of their lives beyond the workplace—the loss of a child, or a crumbling marriage—make them subject to gossip and speculation by the collective. Always, however, these temporarily individualized characters are smoothly re-absorbed into the “we.” Even characters who are fired and become individualized through their exit continue to belong to the office, as they return or attempt to return in forms of protest often so bound by what is expected of their kind that their would-be radical actions ring hollow, or become constrained in frail, comic ways. In one gesture as futile as Bartleby’s non-rebellion, laid off Tom Mota depends on the company’s own email to continue delivering screeds about the virtues of manual labor and the inhumanity of office work to his former. Ferris’ language is convincingly, familiarly corporate, with his characters rattling off overblown titles for themselves and for the multitude of meetings they must attend. Yet is also inventive enough to give this particular firm a sense of being specific and at least somewhat unique. Bookshelves become “buckshelves” due to one character’s mispronunciation, and as other characters repeat the word it becomes office folklore in an imaginative, balancing touch.

With the outside world seen almost entirely through the skewed lens of gossip, the story becomes chilling and claustrophobic, as when the murder of a co-worker’s child is made more “real” to the collective by Photoshopping the victim’s image until it looks right for their reward poster. Such narcissism makes the collapse of their world seem inevitable, even desirable, which is perhaps due to the novel being far longer than necessary: as gossip piles upon gossip and snipe upon snipe, the tedium of office politics approaches imitative fallacy. This insularity is only broken by a lengthy section in which narration follows Lynn Mason (the partner responsible for supervising most of the characters) while she is away from the office. As Lynn’s personal, mental life is revealed to an extent no other character’s is, the completion and strength she draws from her work are powerfully contrasted with the anxious, juvenile scrabbling of her employees—indeed, Lynn is made human by doing her job while those beneath her fantasize about leaving their jobs despite having no other dreams. This narrative disruption, however, also proves problematic as the collective voice that has become so complex and compelling is diminished by the choice to privilege an individual manager over anonymous workers. However humanized Lynn Mason becomes, and despite this section of the novel being the most emotionally affecting, it reads as if the author has announced, “this is the part of the story that matters.”

As the firm sinks around them and they are forced to move on, the company-men and -women of Then We Came to the End remain, with few exceptions, voluntary prisoners. They trade one failing firm for others that may also fail. They pay lip service to the world beyond their offices, but show no great desire to join it. Without offering easy or forced resolutions to his characters, Ferris manages despite their narcissism, denial, and often cruelty to craft a novel that is as compassionate and disturbing as Bartleby’s own story. Ferris’ workers may be more willing to work than Melville’s was, but they do so only as a default while the desperation of defining themselves as the sum of their titles and meetings and office chairs is no less palpable than in the earlier story. It may be evidence of Melville’s prescience that so little has changed over time, or perhaps sad confirmation that whatever changes have occurred are in large part superficial. Either way, Then We Came to the End engages that legacy in original and challenging ways.