Then We Came to The End

Joshua Ferris’s well-reviewed debut novel draws no less than three comparisons to Catch-22 in its “Praise for” section. One can see why – the book is the same mixture of humor and sadness that Heller utilized so effectively, and disgruntled office workers and disgruntled soldiers aren’t too different. Also, Ferris is cribbing jokes from Heller in the very first page. The original, on page 3 of Catch-22:

“The Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.”

And the third sentence of Then We Came to the End: “Most of us liked everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled.”

I’m sure everyone appreciates an homage to Catch-22, but if I were Ferris, I wouldn’t want to set my book anywhere near Catch-22 – the airmen of Pianosa cast a pretty long shadow. So I read skeptically, as John Yossarian might.

The first facet of the book I challenged was its narrative voice. TWCTTE received a lot of admiration from critics for its daring usage of the first-person plural. Yes, almost all of the book takes place in the “we”. For whatever reason, the book has a reading guide appended right to the end, so here’s Ferris’s rationale for the stylistic choice: “Companies tend to to refer to themselves in the first-person plural… What used to be the ‘royal we’ might now be thought of as the ‘corporate we’… In Then We Came to the End, you see just who this ‘we’ really is – a collection of messy human beings – stripped of their glossy finish and eternal coprorate optimism.”

Fair enough, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a gimmick, like writing in the second person. The narrator is the summed consciousnesses of every employee, and while it’s interesting to explore the group’s psychology, the real problem is a group doesn’t have a psychology. A group is something intangible that results when a bunch of individuals get together and for a complex web of relationships. So why not ground your narrative with the individuals, since they’re the base anyways? Ferris anticipates this critique, and I think he suggests throughout the book that that’s precisely the point: there are no individuals at the workplace, not really, just cogs who come and go depending on the vicissitudes of the economy. It’s a valid counter, but I don’t buy it entirely – I suspect Ferris mainly wanted to play around with this very novel narrative voice. And offers instant juxtapositions and all kinds of opportunites for irony.

But Ferris really succeeds when he starts dealing with individuals. Tom Mota, a bit of a maniac with a thing for declaiming Ralph Waldo Emerson, stands out as the book’s best character, a hard-line contrarian on the order of a Yossarian. And more shades of the assyrian when Carl Garbedian strips naked in his car as his wife is trying to drop him off, and refuses to enter the building, much like when Yossarian rejected his uniform. But better than the grunts is their boss, Lynn, who struggles with a diagnosis of breast cancer. There’s a long section in the middle that abandons the “we” in favor of a more conventional 3rd person narrative, and it’s superb. Lynn’s well-rendered, and, according to the oh-so-handy reading guide, this “interlude is the book’s emotional heart.” True enough, Lynn’s story salvages a book that otherwise threatens to be a weaker version of the third season of The Office (which wasn’t even a good season to begin with).

Again, I’m pretty much pitting Catch-22 vs. a debut novel, which is unfair unless your debut novel is… Catch-22. So to be fair, yes, Then We Came to the End is a funny book, and yes, it can generate some pathos. But the action in Then We Came to the End isn’t as hilarious as Captain Black or as heartbreaking as Snowden. Yet even with the specter of Catch-22 looming over it, TWCTTE does manage to make itself known. It’s an enjoyable book and a fast read, and Joshua Ferris is somebody you’ll be seeing again.