Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris - Book Review

Before landing the job I’ve had now for a little over a year, I spent nearly five years working in 'cubicle hell’ at a bank. Since leaving that place, I swore to one day write a book about my experiences. Then along comes Then We Came to the End and I thought author Joshua Ferris had gotten my same idea. Turns out this is a different take on office work. Fans of movies like Office Space or the TV show The Office will probably like it, but the book is a lot more serious and less funny that it makes out to be.

This book really doesn’t have much of a plot. Instead, it focuses on a large cast of characters who all work for an ad agency. The agency is having financial problems, and people are being ‘let go’ (laid off, fired, etc.) every other week. With the thought of impending unemployment hanging over everyone’s heads, they find themselves commissioned with a task to create a series of humorous ads about breast cancer. Again and again the characters will ask themselves – What’s funny about breast cancer?

Parts of this book work very well and other parts don’t. What Ferris really nailed was all the different personalities that tend to inhabit office environments. He also picked up on the weird behaviors and routines that people tend to get into when working in their ‘home away from home’. I especially liked how people would make passing comments to each other in the kitchen while they fixed their coffee. Not like anyone was listening or cared about what the other person had to say, but people felt obliged to simply acknowledge someone else’s presence. At my old job, some people wouldn’t even do that.

As for what did not work so well, I thought it had way too many characters and it was hard to keep up. I was halfway through the book before I could finally tell some of them apart. Ferris also has many extra long passages where one character recounts a conversation they had with another character. There’s heavy pronoun use and weird punctuation that make it a little hard to read at times.

The little blurbs on the cover would make you think this is some kind of side-splitting comedy about working in an office, but it isn’t. I found it to be rather bittersweet, though funny at times. There are some things that happen toward the end that put sort of a melancholy spin on the whole thing. Just don’t go into this expecting antics like what Steve Carrell does on TV in The Office.

Ferris wrote most of the story using a plural first person perspective, meaning he used ‘we’ instead of ‘I’. The paperback has a brief Q&A; section with the author where he explained using this perspective. Basically, Ferris said that people in offices tend to work and function as a group, so the use of ‘we’ seemed much for fitting. It’s a little distracting when you first start reading, but after a while you get used to it. Rather than being a writing gimmick, it does actually fit the story.

If you now work or have ever worked in an office environment, you’ll probably get a little joy out of this story. Personally, I liked Then We Came to the End.