Then We Came to the End

Second reading: I'm feeling that achy-love feeling that comes when you've turned the last page of a really good book. What really struck me this time around was the quality of the writing, how everything is so well said and purposeful and just right. It's something that I notice a lot more as I get older, an author's use of language and style, and I have no tolerance for flabby meandering writing. Reader, this book is sharp and on point. Highly recommend.

First reading: Feels kind of like the movie “Office Space”, but better. Seriously.

The book starts off less like a novel and more like a collection of great anecdotes your friend is sharing during happy hour. This was a little unexpected for me, but it only took about a chapter to get into the flow. About halfway through the story structure becomes more linear and plot-focused.

I have to share the following passage because my office just went through the exact same thing with our second floor, and the author totally nailed the feeling:
“[Floor:] Fifty-nine was a ghost town. We needed to gather up the payroll staff still occupying a quarter of that floor and find room for them among the rest of us and close down fifty-nine, seal it off like a contamination site. Odds were we were contractually bound to pay rent on that floor through the year, shelling out cash we didn't have for real estate we didn't need. But who knows - maybe we were keeping those abandoned cubicles and offices in hopes of a turnaround. It wasn't always about ledger work at the corporate level. Sometimes, like with real people, it was about faith, hope, and delusion.”

Life in the office, when things are good and as things grow worse. The stories pour out from the collective voices of the office personnel, dark, light, deep, insignificant, but always out of control. Never feels soap opera-ish, despite the growing despair of the staff facing layoffs and benefit cuts.

I felt compelled to write a brief review of this book having seen one who hated it. I read it a while ago and don't have it on hand at the moment but I do remember the basic plot and I thought it was great and inventive way to depict our modern cubicle lives and it really captured the anomie the pervades office jobs were we are cogs in the great machine, plus it is funny as hell. Give it a try & you won't regret it!

I truly wanted to like this more than I did. After reading some positive reviews, I was fully prepared to like it. It had the feel of a blind date for me; several friends swore to me I'd just love it! They sold me on our commonalities (it takes place in an office with catty co-workers, and hey YOU work in an office with no shortage of catty co-workers!). Smart without being pretentious, they told me. Very popular and highly thought of, they added.

First impressions were good. There was some good conversation and laughter. This one's quirky, I thought to myself. I could see myself spending some time with this one! But what seemed so promising in the beginning turned dull. I lost interest in the conversation....I found myself disappointed by the shallowness, the talk of all the meetings in offices that eventually reeked with sameness. By the time the characters showed some believable development, I was too bored to care.

It wasn't horrible, mind you. There was the occasional witty dialogue. A well-placed word or two. I may actually give the author another chance. But in the end with this one, I was indifferent.

Soo. I read this as part of the 2015 challenge that compelled me to read an author I knew nothing about - and also because I got a great price due to a promotion by Little Brown and company. The story was interesting - an advertising agency that is falling apart in 99 or so - and portrays life in an office in an accurate, albeit sad, way.
The thing is that it was a bit irregular for me: there were parts I really loved, in which characters seemed to become people I almost could say hi to by the coffee machine. And there were others during which I just sneered at them and felt like saying “grow up already”. All in all, if it was his first book, it may be promising. I haven't checked.

Is it too much to ask to have a great novel set in the cubicle farms I'm so familiar with? Maybe it's just too difficult to mine that otherwise dreary setting. Most seem immediately dated and overplayed like Aeron chairs and Segways. Maybe in a hundred years time they'll seem more relevant in a Dickensonian way.

Ferris doesn't exactly start strong with the use of the first person plural which loops in on itself at the end. It's distancing and jarring but maybe that's the point. I've read reviews that damn the whole story as obviously the product of a writer's workshop. It's just too clever by half. The middle section really clicked for me but then I'm just falling for the metaphor and enjoying at how it hints at a greater subtext.

See, now I'm talking like some writer workshop douche offering up my sincere meaning criticisms. OK read, still waiting for the great office novel.