Plenty of TV sitcoms are set largely or entirely in the workplace. The best workplace sitcoms (like The Office or M*A*S*H) can both distill and exaggerate the absurdities of modern existence while still telling entertaining stories about fully realized characters. But novels centered on the workplace–especially comedic novels–are much less common. Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came To The End is such a novel and it succeeds brilliantly as both satire and a studied observation of human relationships.
The book is set in a Chicago ad agency at the end of the dot-com boom at the outset of the new millennium; massive layoffs are imminent and everyone is gripped by a crippling fear that they will be the next unlucky soul forced to “walk Spanish”–handed a pink slip and instructed to pack their things. As work dries up and morale plummets, the employees are seized by all kinds of work-induced neuroses. They worry about whether the office manager will discover that they stole a chair from a previously terminated colleague. They overanalyze the random comments of a superior. They gossip and go to great lengths to look busy.
Ferris uses the collective “we” throughout most of the book and, rather than being gimmicky, it’s a surprisingly effective narrative method. It’s a play on the sense of anonymity that pervades most corporate workplaces, but it also gives us a peek into the collective mentality of a group of people struggling to cope not only with potential job loss, but depression, anger, and loneliness. Ferris depicts the workplace as an echo chamber of snap judgments, persistent rumors, and the endless search for distraction. But that’s not to say these characters are uniformly unlikeable. They do manage to perform acts of kindness both large and small for one another, even for colleagues they don’t necessarily like.
It seems fitting to read this book in the midst of another recession that makes the previous one look like an innocuous hiccup. One of the guys in my book club mentioned that just reading this book made him anxious about his own job. Ferris has tapped into the essential insecurities that plague us in this new age. Lack of stability. Materialism. Isolation. For him, work is a deeply ambivalent force in our lives. It offers some measure of predictability in a chaotic world, but it can also drive us crazy.
