(From March, 2007:) Joshua Ferris has written a funny and horrifying first novel about workplace paranoia, “Then We Came to the End” (Little, Brown).
The book takes place at a Chicago advertising agency in 2001 — when the collapse of the dotcom boom is beginning to have a savage effect on the bottom lines of the marketing and ad firms that fed at the Internet trough in the late 1990s.
Lay-offs start and the workers begin to live in fear that they will be “walking Spanish” any day (the term is derived from a Tom Waits song about pirates who forced their prisoners to walk the plank).
Ferris captures the distinctive atmosphere of office life where casual friendships and alliances change from day to day depending on the mood that filters down from management.
“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled,” Ferris writes at the start of the novel’s opening chapter, “You Don’t Know What’s in My Heart.”
Ferris presents most of the story in the first person plural which fits the narrative perfectly; the novel is about the weirdness of spending eight hours a day with a “family” that only exists as long as a corporation continues to fund it.
“Then We Came to the End” charts the feuds and the fears of highly educated, upper-middle class people who have no real sense of their worth to their bosses and assume the ax could fall at any moment.
The novelist’s honesty about working groups pushes us to the edge of tastelessness:
“We hated Karen Woo. We hated hating Karen Woo because we feared we might be racists. The white guys especially. But it wasn’t just the white guys. Benny, who was Jewish, and Hank, who was black, hated Karen too. Maybe we hated Karen not because she was Korean but because she was a woman with strong opinions in a male-dominated world. But it wasn’t just the men; Marcia couldn’t stand her and she was a woman. And Marcia loved Donald Sato, so she couldn’t be a racist. Donald wasn’t Korean but he was Asian of some kind, and everybody liked him as much as Marcia did even though he didn’t say a whole lot.”
The book shifts from black comedy to tragedy in a bravura chapter in which the office leader contemplates cancer surgery and realizes she has nothing in her life other than her work.
But, the overall tone of “Then We Came to the End” is the unexpected hilarity and mad scheming of dog-eat-dog business, including a classic bit in which one stressed-out man decides to limit his office speech to dialogue drawn from the first two “Godfather” pictures:
“At the conclusion of a morning meeting, during which he had remained perfectly silent, as everyone was packing up their things, Benny turned to Heidi Savoca and said, ‘I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless, but not men.’ Heidi’s expression indicated she didn’t know where Benny’s comment was coming from, but more pressing than her confusion was her distaste for the remark itself, ‘That’s a very sexist thing to say, Benny,’ she replied. Later that morning, Seth Keegan stopped by Benny’s cube to ask him a question about some revisions for a project the two had been working on over the course of the previous few weeks. ‘Do you have a minute?’ Seth asked Benny. Benny swiveled in his chair. ‘This one time,’ he said. ‘This one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.’”
