The desk-dwellers at Dunder-Mifflin (and their predecessors at Wernham-Hogg) have opened the door so we can chuckle at the banal absurdity of office life. After all, most of us are familiar enough with the quirks and frustrations that fill the week. But in real life we can't gain the necessary distance to really laugh at the office weirdo, or see past the petty alliances and feuds. Joshua Ferris's novel Then We Came to the End hits a little closer to the reality of working in the cubicle zone.
The novel (Ferris's first) is about a group of coworkers at an unnamed advertising firm in Chicago, presumably during the heady days of the very early 2000s. The coffee bar lattes are plentiful and the desk chairs ergonomic, but an ever-larger rash of layoffs is starting to make everyone a little crazy. There's the resident psycho, who spouts off about philosophy, whines about his ex-wife, and hides rotting sushi rolls as a form of cosmic punishment. There's the office "couple," in which half is newly pregnant and the other half is already married (much less cute than Pam and Jim). There's also the quasi-boss, who's hated by the staff for no good reason; and the real boss, who's so removed from the group that everyone would rather sneak around and get illegal, confidential information from a hospital than ask her directly if she's dying of breast cancer like they believe she is. Everyone is weird, but believably so.In all of these people, however, there's no real protagonist. The dominant voice is a royal "we," where the "I" has been entirely absorbed by the group. This is a pretty unusual choice--I can't think, offhand, of any other books which use the omniscient second person like that. At first, I waited patiently for a character to emerge from the shield of solidarity, but after a while I liked that the narrator was sucked so completely into the absurd gravity of the office.
The casual cruelty, the superficial interests--they're the heart of the atmosphere. It's not unlike Mean Girls in the picture the book creates of non-physical brutality. No action or thought is simple enough for the watercooler vultures. It's got to have reasons, secret motivations, instant repercussions, etc. For example, the office's failed aspirants (novelist and screenwriter turned copywriters, etc.) are mocked for trying to find the golden narrative thread that justifies their sellout status. Yet everyone else is trying to find the same meaning, in the same building. My stuff is sacred, but yours is not, because you dare to be open about it. The sustained hypocrisy of being annoyed at others' idiocy while fearing exclusion is palpable, and it's probably the best part of the book.
The climax is a farce of violence, and it reflects our own wish for drama and our inability to cope with it when it comes and screws up the mundane. Good stuff.
Not that everything is mired in depressive social commentary. In all the awkwardness and the cruelty, there are spots of genuine sweetness and humor. They keep the whole thing from being too depressing and monotonous. Just like with real coworkers.
Some of the bits I liked best:
"When we heard Benny was not getting rid of the totem pole but had chosen to keep it, even going so far as to store it at great personal expense, we kept asking him why. Why, Benny? Why? Benny, why? When he continued to refuse to tell us--or perhaps he just found himself unable to explain his reasons even to himself--we let the full force of our dissatisfaction be known. We did not like not knowing something. We could not abide being left in the dark. And we thought it was the height of hypocrisy for Benny, who was always telling everyone about everyone else, to try and keep a secret from us. So we took up squawking at him. We did mockeries of ceremonial dances in his doorway. The worst thing we did was take scissors to this old toupee Chris Yop had in his basement, and put the mangled thing on Benny's desk, which Karen Woo doused with a bottle of fake blood she had in her office, so that what lay on the desk looked like a fresh scalping. Someone suggested we find a yarmulke to put on top, but we all sort of agreed that to marry those two atrocities together would be stepping over a line."
"But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work."
"She took comfort knowing where he was, even if she wasn't with him. Finding him at home, however, waking him up, she realizes she knows nothing of where he might have been or what he was doing, and that's very, very unsettling. She thinks the worst--a drink with someone new, fresh conversation, the beginning of what he does want. She's lost him."
"Even with the best of intentions, it was impossible not to offend one another. We fretted over the many insignificant exchanges we found ourselves in from day to day. We weren't thinking, words just flew from our mouths--unfettered, un-thought-out--and next we knew, we had offended someone with an offhand or innocent remark. We might have implied someone was fat, or intellectually simple, or hideously ugly. Most of the time we probably felt it was true. We worked with some fat, simple people, and the hideously ugly walked among us as well. But by god we wanted to keep quiet about it."
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