Ferris writes the novel in the first-person plural — the snarky, gossipy, anxious employees of the agency compose the collective narrator...The collective voice is fitting for corporate employees, trained to work in teams, their groupthink honed in a million meetings, and the effect is chilling when the layoffs begin and the collective narrator is literally diminished … The major story lines of Then We Came to the End hold few surprises. Like a make-work project, they are an excuse to get through the real joys of the day, which come from Ferris’s small-bore observations. The Pavlovian magnetism of free bagels. The incredible sadness of a hard-boiled egg eaten at one’s desk. And the prophylactic amnesia that separates time on the clock from the set of waking hours we call ‘our lives.’
As the novel commences in the late 1990s, we're introduced to the workplace by way of a collective recollection of headier times … While the We voice contributes to the book's strangely compelling vibe, it also presents challenges. Occasionally, the narrative suffers from too many anecdotes that begin along the lines of, We heard such and such from so and so who heard it from . . . And in the first sections, the collective We represents such a large, diverse group that it's difficult to feel emotionally vested. But this is only because Ferris does not cheat, and his discipline pays off nicely in the end … Ferris skillfully balances the comic with the authentic, the insightful with the absurd, and we can't help but be transfixed by their stories.
Then We Came to the End is full of such brilliant miniature treatises — on the experience of time (‘We had visceral, rich memories of dull, interminable hours’), the hierarchies of complaint, the meaning of lunch — all heartfelt and delivered in solemn deadpan, constituting a veritable poetics of the office. The novel is narrated primarily in the first-person plural — not the noble, empowered We the People, but the we-the-undifferentiated masses … What looks at first glance like a sweet-tempered satire of workplace culture is revealed upon closer inspection to be a very serious novel about, well, America. It may even be, in its own modest way, a great American novel.
Ferris's tale begins as a satiric manifesto for the overpaid but understimulated white-collar worker ... Anxiety, like office life, is a daily fact of American living, but it presents challenges for a story teller. How hard do you tweak it? Do you use it to turn some characters wild, or keep it at a low, sonorous hum, as in Ann Beattie's work? Ferris wisely knows there is only so much ha-ha and hee-hee to squeeze for amusing cruelty, so, as the bodies begin to pile up and the lay off ax chops faster, the humor is increasingly mediated by moments of touching solidarity.
Ferris' debut novel, set in the cubicles of a Chicago advertising firm as the dot-com boom shuddered its last, is a charming and sometimes very funny story of worker bees pushed past the brink of boredom … Ferris maintains a wonderfully wry tone and has a fine observational eye for all the absurdities of the modern workplace. Disgusting smells surface, and it turns out someone hid a sushi roll in an enemy's office. A boss rolls his bike into his office and locks the front wheel and frame together as if it might be stolen at work. (Actually, considering all the pranks, that's probably a good idea.) But despite his earnestness and empathy for these characters, Ferris never really makes them whole — certainly not whole enough to sustain nearly 400 pages.
Set at a Chicago ad agency at the turn of the century, Ferris's novel is for anyone who chuckles over Dilbert, can recite lines from Office Space, or has an appointment on Thursday nights with The Office. Then We Came to the End is a vicious sendup of cubicle culture that somehow manages not to lose sight of its characters' humanity … If Ferris were just being clever and snarky, Then We Came to the End would buckle in on itself long before the warm-hearted epilogue. But even his most gonzo creation is given a sympathetic aspect that saves him from caricature.
Then We Came to the End is very good at capturing the interactions between co-workers, depicting a company as a family of sorts, with all a family's love and annoyance, the kind that make you defend a co-worker vigorously one day and want to stick a knife in him the next. Ferris knows that, for all our complaints about work (‘Can you believe it's only three-fifteen?’), our jobs are what give structure and meaning to our lives and that the fear of losing a job is motivated by far more than the simple loss of a paycheck … Then We Came to the End is an assured debut and an entertaining read.
Set in a Chicago-based ad agency reeling from the 2000-2001 dot-com crash, it's a satire narrated by a corporate ‘we’ who are having a hard time coping with impending job loss and the revelation that ‘employment, the daily nine-to-five, was driving us far from our better selves’ … As for the wild card that keeps the book from being a one-note joke, it's human experience in forms both sobering (marital breakup, serious illness) and farcical (an office love affair, a bizarre inheritance) … There's a terrific payoff to the book, which isn't just a barbed take on its chosen era but a truly affecting novel about work, trust, love and loneliness.
It explores the relationship between individual identity and the hive, joining a venerable, if still short, list of modern American novels about work … Then We Came to the End chronicles, in ironized, meandering style, the company's bumpy transition from the glory days of the Internet boom (‘[t]he world was flush with Internet cash, and we got our fair share of it’) to the austere months following the stock market crash of April 2000. The agency embarks on a series of layoffs that provide the ostensible plot engine, but Ferris absorbs us with close observations of life lived under fluorescent lights … What ties the novel together is the canny formal choice Ferris has made: his decision to write the novel in the first-person plural.
Ferris's 'we' is a fractious, hydra-headed array of copywriters and art directors, from upbeat networker Karen Woo to grizzled, reclusive Frank Brizzolera. Their days of extravagant anomie are shaped by a patchwork of kitchen gossip, emails and snippets that filter down from the office of their forbidding boss … Ferris is brilliant on the pathos of the 'useless shit' that surrounds his workers. In an attenuated world of modular desks and coffee stations, 'our mugs, our mouse pads, our desk clocks, our daily calendars, the contents of our desk drawers' take on a life of their own, alternately hoarded and despised as reminders of hundreds of lost days … Then We Came to the End is preoccupied by the treacherous non-durability of consumer durables. Beyond the revolving security doors lies grander-scale private suffering. But the novel reserves its greatest compassion for the disregarded sadnesses of the office.
Ferris has created a hilarious collection of office gargoyles … We're in the story. We are nothing less than a modern Greek chorus, standing by the coffee machine, hand on hip, going: No! Did she actually say that? Who the hell does he think he is? And so on. It's a good trick, because it stops us from despising these wage slaves as much as we might. We are complicit in their judgmentalism … It's hard to work out, in the end, whether Ferris's novel is funny or sad. It's certainly absurd, and very entertaining.
In this wildly funny debut from former ad man Ferris, a group of copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the end of the '90s boom ... At once delightfully freakish and entirely credible, Ferris's cast makes a real impression.
This debut novel about life in a Chicago advertising agency succeeds as both a wickedly incisive satire of office groupthink and a surprisingly moving meditation on mortality and the ties that band ... the novel rarely ventures beyond the cubicle and the conference room, making Ferris’s ability to sustain narrative momentum all the more impressive. The narrator is an ingenious device, a nameless one who uses the third-person “we” to suggest that he (or she) might be any one of the office group. Yet since most or all within the office show that their perceptions are seriously skewed, the reader is never quite sure how much the narrator can be trusted.
