Joshua Ferris is one funny little possum, but more than the terrific humor in Then We Came To The End (2007), there’s that clear eye in describing the all-too familiar terrain called the workplace. Who else has already ventured in this? Why oh why does it take a full-time fiction writer (though an after-college stint at an advertising agency lent him the experience) to tell us that we office workers are often the “mismanaged inventory,” that there are many faces to that soul-draining corporate citizenship, but that often it all boils down to us being bored and too pampered by the establishment?
There’s the ragbag of characters, too: the Jewish raconteur, the one who always dishes out the juicy tales even if it’s way past breaktime; the substandard copywriter who keeps coming back even while he was already “walked Spanish down the hall”; the many lovely women who are stuck with ghastly haircuts or are too beautiful or are decisive about keeping some other woman’s husband’s child. The best thing about their portrayal is that it wasn’t done in a distasteful way; there are multiple aspects to them, not merely office drones who are not seen rising up the ladder or eating their less competent coworkers for breakfast. They have lives; these lives, though, just happen to take off from the “cubicle world” that enables them to afford their lifestyle, to exercise creativity and a brand of eccentricity, or to seek a universe apart from the weekday one.
The system is somehow “deglamourized”; the whole system’s unspared from economic crunch, violence (in the form of downright dirty gossip or otherwise), and ultimately, death of the many personal and corporate kinds. and nothing is more fitting than the “we,” that undeniably collective voice that tells us we’re all and the same, but not quite, but who knows at the end of the day, right?
I’ve had my own share of adventures (or lack thereof) in my own little office space for some time now, and it’s not a Herculean task to identify with the characters of this world Ferris imagined with an almost religious fervor. It’s like my life – and yours – summarized, and we’re let in on something we can endlessly identify with. Like layoffs, or mid-morning coffee breaks, or maybe something more, like our own demise.
