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1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Snore Mar 14, 2010
This book came to my attention when I was checking up on the book I was reading at the time. That book was "After the Workshop" by John McNally. It was an enjoyable read. It was witty and well paced. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for "Then We Came to the End." For me it will be called, "I Never Came to the End." I have picked this book up on six separate occasions and forced myself to read as many pages as I could. It's embarrassing that I've not made it through the first chapter, especially since I rarely leave a book unfinished. It's long-winded paragraph after paragraph of someone telling me rather than showing me. It's like reading the blog of the most boring person you know. I'm glad that there are people who enjoy it and wish Mr. Ferris all the best. Read the first few pages yourself and let your reaction be your guide.
 Less CATCH 22, more SOMETHING HAPPENED, but all wonderful Mar 06, 2010
There are a lot of comparisons to Catch-22 in the reviews for Then We Came to the End, and they're understandable, given the book's sprawling cast and the meandering, episodic, time-jumping narrative. And yet, for all the quiet humor, the Heller book I found myself remembering again and again was Something Happened, Heller's quietly desperate and melancholy book about office life in the middle class. Told in a first-person plural style that emphasizes the way we interact with our offices, Then We Came to the End tells the story of a Chicago ad agency slowly falling apart in the wake of the burst dot-com bubble. Is it funny? Undoubtedly - from people conversing only in Godfather quotes to workers who keep working long after they've been laid off, Ferris finds that mundane, everyday humor that pervades the work lives of us all. But in the end, it's not the humor that makes Ferris's book so successful; it's the undercurrent of desperation, loneliness, and isolation that truly makes the book soar, taking what could have been just another Dilbert or The Office and making it into a wonderful study of modern life. With characters facing death, mid-life crises, and all sorts of office melodrama, Ferris somehow manages to walk the thin line between comedy and tragedy, and the result is a minor miracle - a wonderful book whose characters and world are so rich and vibrant that the ending of the book made me sad to leave it all behind, all the way to the perfect last line.
OR: THE ALL-NEW ADVENTURES OF A PROTOPLASMIC BLOB THAT HATES ITSELF Feb 10, 2010
Reduced to the barest elements of its plot, THEN WE CAME TO THE END, Joshua Ferris's 2007 debut novel, is little more than the story of the employees of a major Chicago advertising firm, working and procrastinating during the thriving late-1990s Internet bubble and the long economic downturn that followed. As the economy continues to slide, the tension of imminent layoffs haunts every employee, eliciting everything from humor to pathos to real sadness in every one of them, as the inevitable end promised by the book's title grows closer and closer.
The above synopsis may make the book sound sterile and/or unoriginal, and reduced to that, yes, it might be, but the TELLING of the book, particularly its structure and point of view, make it one of the most compelling and original reads I have come across in recent American fiction.
The story unfolds in five initial chapters in the first-person-plural voice--it's all "we'" and "us" and "our"--leading to one intriguing chapter in third-person about an employer suffering from cancer, and then to five more chapters in first-person plural, and suggesting, at least initially, that the individual is at the center of everything.
The book was at its best when depicting the narrative voice as a sort of protoplasmic blob that can move amoeba-like in every direction at once. (For instance, on page 119: "We broke apart, climbing down to fifty-nine and up to sixty-three and to the floors in between.") We see parts of the WE watch individuals get fired and think "Thank god it wasn't me" and it just underlines the foolishness of hoping for another part of our collective to suffer over ourselves, because we're all part of that larger collective, it is us, and the well-being of our fellow humans is our well-being as well. And yet, we also see a small number of staunch individualists do well but feel really lonely, or be left to get angry alone, and discover they need the collective for various reasons. A moderate solution recognizing both individuality and a place in the collective seems to be the author's implied suggestion.
When the WE of the book finally comes to its end, as the title assures us it must, the WE of the book is shown to be incredibly broad--to incorporate all of America, or all of the world, and is echoed a bit by how intimate and inclusive that WE reveals itself to be in the book's final moments. Along the way, most of the characters in this book are used as symbols of one or more ideas, and because they are almost all purposefully underdeveloped, they might occasionally seem a bit flat. But really, there is only one character in this book: US.
My only complaints about the book would be about how banal and uninteresting some of its ongoing conflicts become after many pages of them. I suppose that's just office culture, but still, make something up. (Also: totem poles don't come from anywhere near Arizona. Could that error have been intentional?) The book's tone, although way more melancholy than it was funny, its unique POV, and its examination of the collective and its components--of what WE are, vs. what an "I" is, was just great, and gave me much enjoyment and cause for thought. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in originally voiced fiction, and I look forward to reading Ferris's other book, THE UNNAMED.
AKA "The Office" Feb 05, 2010
This book is not worth a lengthy review.
I read to page 63 and had to stop. The author wasn't giving me any suspense, important information, or hope that the story was going to get any better than office gossip, shenanigans, politics and power. I don't find that absorbing or worthy of my time.
Yes, it reminded me of the current TV sensation, "The Office," but I don't like that show either and for the same reasons. I don't like soap operas: They're filled with uninspiring, insipid, critical, self-absorbing characters.
So, THIS is a national bestseller? Well, forgive me (no, don't), but my taste in books runs differently.
2 of 4 found the following review helpful:
What am I missing??? Feb 01, 2010
I see that Ferris is in Time this week (for his new novel, "The Unnamed"). In the article "Then We Came to the End" is referred to as "a knockout". I just read this piece and found it muddy, maudlin, gimmicky, over-populated, predictable and awkwardly executed. And here this freshman-level writer is in Time! THIS is why I try not to read current fiction. There's just something Faustian going on here, but instead of feeling like I am on the right side of Heaven, I end up feeling like someone has given me crazy-pills!!
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