Book Review: Then We Came To The End Puts the "We" in Ennui

Book Review by Noah Mallin

Joshua Ferris was once an ad man and the experience seems to have scarred him for life. Lucky us because his debut novel, Then We Came to the End out in paperback now, joins the canon of great modern office art. I don't mean the posters with the little kitty clutching a limb and the legend "Hang in There" emblazoned across the bottom, I mean art inspired by the office work experience. On some level Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road captured a piece of this as far back as 1961 but films like Office Space and both the American and British versions of The Office on TV make the collective hive of the work environment a subject and character in and of itself.

Ferris chooses an initially off-putting technique to convey the team consciousness of the workplace. Most of Then We Came to the End is narrated in the first person plural as in, "We asked Yop how long ago this was." Like starting a new job, it takes some time to acclimate to the rhythm this imposes but after a while it becomes second nature. It's also a device that captures some of the groupthink that exists in the specific setting - an ad agency that is very tied to the dotcom boom of the late 90s.

As they start to run into financial trouble and the layoffs begin, so too does the paranoia. There is a great sequence involving the office furniture, serial numbers and using the chairs of ex-employees that captures a measure of the Kafka-esque circus an office can be.

There is also a stretch mid-book where the narrative form changes and we get to know the boss Lynn, who is rumored to have cancer (no-one can trace the rumour's source). Although it's a bit disorienting it's also a very affecting part of the novel, and there is a nice payoff to it later on.

Ultimately Then We Came to the End is quite funny while also being awfully bleak, something it has in common with much of the best office art. It's a little sobering to think about which character one most resembles -- especially when we do get to end. Are we the guy whose office everyone hangs out in, the woman who is resented for always having the best idea, the grind, the wild man, the one everyone denigrates? It's telling that Ferris goes beyond stereotypes to build real characters out of most of these people and letting their petty and their noble sides jostle together.

Full of surprises, insight, tenderness and brutally comic satire, Then We Came to the End is a delight.

Book Review: Lethem's "You Don't Love Me Yet" Inspires Like...Not Love

Book Review by Noah Mallin

"You can't be deep without a surface" is uttered by two characters in Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, You Don't Love Me Yet and this slogan is as apt a motto for the book as any. I might as well say that this engaging breeze of a read is a disappointment after the lofty heights of his magical realist Brooklyn opus Fortress of Solitude and it's noir predecessor Motherless Brooklyn. Unlike the aforementioned, Lethem gets the surfaces all right but the depths remain resolutely unexplored.

The novel traces the horned-up path of bassist Lucinda Hoekke and her nameless band through L.A.'s bohemian latticework (a brave locale for a New York oriented writer). Hoekke answers phones for a "complaint line" masterminded by her artist ex, becoming obsessed with one caller in particular she calls "The Complainer." Some of his more interesting musings become grist for her band's songwriting mill, finally giving them the focus to write really great tunes. The problem is that The Complainer finds his way into both Lucinda and her band, complicating everything.

Issues of creativity and authorship are raised, only to slide across the slippery surface and drop off the edge. Lucinda barely gets past one dimension and The Complainer seems to be more an idea than a rounded character. Things happen, there are some funny scenes and clever conceits, but little of it adds up to much at all. He's on his firmest ground when his characters discuss theories of film and music but when it comes to the deeper issues of what makes them tick and why he comes up resolutely empty.

There is the shell of what could have been another fantastic Lethem opus here. As it is You Don't Love Me Yet (titled after a great Roky Erickson and a Vulgar Boatmen song -- the man does know his music) feels rushed, like a draft. As easy to skate on as the surface is, alluding to depths is not the same as actually having them.

Book Review: Bechdel's Fun Home Delves Into Bittersweet Memories

Removing a key family member has a way of dislodging all sorts of family secrets and buried experiences that have spent years being packed away. I've seen this from a remove recently with a death in my own family, and it is echoed in Alison Bechdel's searching memoir Fun Home.

Fun Home, like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis books straddle that uncomfortable highbrow/lowbrow divide between "comics" and "literature." As insightful as any plain-text memoir, both get sneered at for some by "cheating" in using a graphic form to help tell their stories. The outsider, neither-fish-nor-fowl nature of both of these enterprises fit well with their author's subject matter. While Satrapi is caught between different worlds during the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, Bechdel and her father exist as different sides of a shared coin.

Bechdel chooses to come out as a lesbian while she's in college. She embraces this part of herself and finds comfort in knowing who she is. Shortly after this she discovers that her father has hidden a major part of his identity from the world through much of his life. Before she is able to have a chance to connect with him fully about their differing experiences with sexual identity, he dies unexpectedly.

Fun Home is Bechdel's examination of she and her father's identities, sexual and otherwise. She tries to understand her remoteness from his death by understanding his remoteness from his children. Delving into memories that take on altered significance with the knowledge she has gained about her father and herself.

The book is suffused with a wry ironic humor. The title comes from what she and her siblings called her father's (and sometimes their) place of business -- a funeral home. The drawings are wonderfully straightforward and precise, as is the prose. There is a touch of Maurice Sendak in her characterizations but none of his whimsy. She often uses her frame to pack in telling details, as when her exacting mother is on the phone sweating the details of her play rehearsal. A little arrow points out that she is removing from the oven "Moussaka for five and fresh sourdough bread in fifteen minutes."

Fun Home, now out in paperback, is a worthy addition to what feels like a gusher of new memoirs. Bechdel has a clear, interesting voice and pen, and her story is at once tragic, funny, and sweet.

Fun Home gets 4 out of 5 hearses: