Then We Came to the End

Then We Came to the End was a delight to read. Anyone who's ever worked in an office (or worked at all) will appreciate its humour. Joshua Ferris' novel is aided greatly by his decision to employ first person plural narration. The collective "we" (used to great effect in Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides) draws the reader in as a co-conspirator; just one of many workers enmeshed too closely in the lives of their colleagues. Even when Ferris breaks from the technique for a short section to focus on one character, he maintains narrator/reader symbiosis with observations about recognizable human preoccupations such as this one: "Imagine if one night in a lifetime were looked upon as a scientist might look upon it, or some other life form studying our species, and from that one night, the worth of the entire life were derived. Well, she'd rather hers not be evaluated by the TV she's watched or the closet she hasn't cleaned." Impossible not to be captivated.

Powells interviewed Ferris about Then We Came to the End last year.