In Which We Actually Recommend A Book

In Which We Actually Recommend A Book by jeff

January 15, 2008, 4:37 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized

The Wall

by Jeff Goldberg

Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

The cover of this fantastic first novel looks remarkably like a wall of my house in 1999. We had this thing the kids liked to call a “dot com” and it was being run out of my living room. The guest bedroom was completely covered in Post-its.

During the day it was a vibrant testament to our brilliance, but at night it glowed with the monochromatic yellow stare of our mothers. “What are you doing with your lives? Are you crazy? You gave up good jobs for this?” The guy living in that room couldn’t sleep for the shame of it. Eventually he snapped, leaving nothing behind but a portion of his rent in the form of a crumpled wad of dollar bills on my pillow. I’m pretty sure he was calling me a whore.

This book already made number 7 on my list of Top Ten books of 2007, but at the time I was only 70 pages in. Now that I’ve actually finished it, it’s moved up to position number 2 (sorry Chabon).

It’s been reviewed enough (it made the NYTimes top five fiction) so I’ll keep the recap short: it’s the layoff-plagued collective narration of a late 90s ad firm. Instead of a plot, this book is threaded together by workplace stories and the individual quirks of a team-narration. The first-person plural is an interesting gimmick, but unlike The Virgin Suicides (the other book famously penned by an anonymous “we”), TWCTTE clearly has a single voice at its heart.

Ignore the NYTimes review when it claims “the effect is chilling when the layoffs begin and the collective narrator is literally diminished,” because that’s not really true at all. The layoffs begin immediately and the book spends a good deal of time flashing back to pre-layoff periods. This book is not about a slow attrition of a workforce, it’s about a network of shared experiences. Like memories, the ordering is contextual rather than chronological.

TWCTTE’s spiritual twin

Ferris is a master of veering from funny to sentimental, and most of the time he knows just how long to play an emotional note before wacky office antics resume. But unlike Aaron Sorkin, who has also made a living by mixing jokes with mawkishness in his collected body of sometimes-excellent/sometimes-crappy TV/movies/theater, I don’t feel nearly as dirty after reading this novel.

It’s funny! Wait, someone’s been kidnapped in Iraq! Oh, another joke! Wait, Chandler’s on drugs!

The thing that really makes this novel for me is its sympathetic view of middle-management. Our standard is to assume we know better and to mock, mock, mock (see Dilbert, The Office, or your own place of employment).

Nowhere in the history of media has there been such a compelling portrait of the middle-manager responsible for firing the narrator of the novel in which that middle-manager is firing people.

ferris. i would bring neither of them home to my mother

Even when it seems to be heading dangerously towards cliché, Then We Came to the End breaks with the common expectations, finding respect and care for the people who pass out the pink-slips, and embedding the the profoundest of words in the rants of the office loon.

Jeff Goldberg is the senior contributor to This Recording. He once served as a very sympathetic middle-manager.

“Don’t Let the Man Get You Down (Justice remix)” – Fatboy Slim (mp3)

“Bermuda Highway” – My Morning Jacket (mp3)

“Foolish Sonnet” – The Verve vs. Ashanti, by Churchill (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

We believed in Alice in Wonderland.

Jess vs. Wes Anderson.

Brian discusses Donald Barthelme.

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