In his darkly comic 2007 debut novel, Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris adopted a first-person-plural narrator ("We didn't know who was stealing things from other people's workstations") to evoke the jargon-rich groupthink of office culture at the dawning of the 21st century. It could have, and perhaps should have, come off as gimmicky and self-conscious, but Ferris showed himself to be entirely in control of his gifts, deploying a series of drastic but deft tonal shifts that kept his extended narrative experiment fresh throughout. Readers of that promising, award-winning work will recall how, for example, Ferris briefly abandoned the corporate "we" to present a slim chapter from the point of view of an office worker dying from breast cancer. That sober and deeply affecting section served to color the novel around it, imbuing Ferris' showy comic gymnastics with an emotional center, a weight it would have otherwise lacked.
So it's both surprising and disappointing that Ferris would follow up such a substantive, complex and tonally variegated accomplishment with The Unnamed, a slimmer and considerably slighter effort. Also surprising: That Ferris' weighty subjects — the disconnect between mind and body, and the distrustful truce that exists between the individual and society — could produce a novel so feathery and abstract.
Tim Farnsworth is a partner at a highly successful Manhattan law firm with a wife and teenage daughter, a house in the suburbs and no money worries to speak of. The reader meets him at the onset of a mysterious condition that has beset him twice before: a sudden and overpowering compulsion to walk incessantly until he collapses from exhaustion. The nature of this illness stymies physician and psychiatrist alike, and Tim's desperate need to find someone to diagnose his condition — and thus clinically justify his physically and psychically punishing travails — provide the novel's early chapters with its recognizable human immediacy. So, too, does Tim's steely but ultimately doomed resolve that his illness will not keep him from defending an important client, or from his loving family.
Here, in the early going, Ferris lays out the stakes. We watch Tim's wife, Jane, lock into a practiced, protective mode at the news that his condition has returned: She prepares a backpack with a first-aid kit and GPS, she rubs his face with Vaseline, she dresses him in wicking socks and waterproof boots. Small, tender moments like this one fully enflesh Ferris' central conceit and make it much more than a high-minded metaphor for the modern condition. But as the novel progresses and Tim's condition takes complete control, Ferris lets what we want to say about alienation and anomie supersede his characters and the way they navigate the world.
Granted, he does it cleverly, as when he neatly captures postmodern alienation from the self with a line or two: "He looked down at his legs. It was like watching footage of legs walking from the point of view of the walker." Or when pithily describing a bout with depression: "She ... needed a new life. She needed to start over with new teeth and fresh underwear."
But like its protagonist, The Unnamed moves resolutely forward with a fixed, trancelike purposelessness. Eventually the novel resolves into a chronicle of losses, big and small — Tim sinks further into an illness that robs him of his job and his family (and more than a few digits, to frostbite.) But Ferris asserts every one of these losses, whether interpersonal or anatomic, using the same blank, affectless tone. The reader's attention isn't directed, events aren't assigned differing psychological weight, so the emotional through-line becomes obscure; a succession of moments and abstract images simply mount up. That's why, by the time we arrive at Ferris' beautifully written but ultimately unearned ending, the experience of reading The Unnamed has already begun to lift off of us, like a vivid but obtuse dream.
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