The book that briefly made me afraid of losing my job
All the critics said it was one of the best books of the last year, and no one to whom I've mentioned it has heard of it yet. I hadn't heard of it, the critical takes or its relevancy before this summer. But Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End was the best read I'd picked up in a while, an office novel, as true to the office as it was to the novel.
IN THE MORNING WE CAME in and hung our spring coats on the back of the door and sat down at our desks and sifted through last night's e-mail for something good. We sipped our first cups of coffee and cleared our voice mails and checked our bookmarked websites. It might have been a day like any other, and we should have been grateful, ecstatic even, to find no declaration of bankruptcy waiting for us in our in-boxes and no officewide memo announcing eviction from the building. We had every reason to believe that payroll management still acknowledged our existence, that Aetna had been paid and remained committed to our well-being, and that no one had been granted a seizure order to repossess our chairs.
"About all," said the glowing New York Times review, "Ferris has a sixth sense for paranoia. Information professionals crave information, and when it is denied them — who is going next, how many and why — they spin superstitious theories and adopt curious totems." Between the book and the industry climate, I spun myself into an all-or-nothing theory about halfway through. It took a few days and couple talks to reassure myself before picking up the rest of the book doing its job.
June 3rd, 2010 at 10:39 PM
[...] Monday," the NYT tells us. Can we have writing with this list, please? Between Russell, the fantastically debuting Joshua Ferris, all the folks who have blown me away in their New Yorker work (like Yiyun Li), let's feature [...]