Today Jonathan Franzen is getting all the attention, thanks to the Time magazine cover story that is unlinkable and probably unread behind Time’s paywall. That’s all ok, but the one writer with initials J.F. you need to know is Joshua Ferris, who wrote the awesome “Then We Came to the End” and the possibly even better “The Unnamed.” The former is about an ad agency as it unravels through round after round of layoffs. It’s written almost entirely in the first-person plural, a tact that could seem gimmicky but isn’t.
His second book is about a big-shot New York lawyer who comes down with a perplexing condition. He suffers from long bouts of being compelled by his body — or his mind maybe (it’s never clear) – to walk and walk and walk andwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkand walkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalkandwalk. He walks until he can walk no longer and passes out wherever he is: a parking lot in Newark, a dumpster in Queens and so on. The only way to stop him from walking it to physically restrain him.
Suffice it to say, this kind of behavior is not something that can be easily integrated into one’s life. That fact means “The Unnamed” is not a happy book and that is not something you would regard as a spoiler were you to read it. I am offering up an excerpt and, in the effort of providing context but not spoiling, I will say only that at a point in the novel the protagonist begins to hear voices. (And you would be wrong to assume that those voices are causally related to the walking.) There’s a passage, which I typed out below, in which one of those voices is addressing the protagonist’s self. Or something like that — I can’t be metaphysically precise on this matter.
Ferris is a extremely controlled, powerful writer. With just these two books, he’s carved something of a niche that I hope he keeps adding to. He’s the master of portraying the miseries of modern, corporate life in a fresh way. I feel like everyone else –Chabon, Lethem, all those guys who are one tangle with Oprah from being on the cover of Time– wants to write about detectives and comic books. This guy Ferris writes about work — and these are jobs that people who would read him actually have i.e. not gumshoes or dicks or codebreakers or whatever — and how that work chips away at one’s being.
I can’t say I get this freshness from Franzen. I think his essay on birdwatching in “How to Be Alone” is wonderful, but a recent rereading of “The Corrections” left me cold. I found myself skimming large swathes and all the characters felt very type-y and, again, very dated. And for some reason being dated in the late 1990s is worse than other ways of being dated. I guess that’s why we wear Journey t-shirts and put “Don’t Stop Believin’” in our HBO finales, but hide our Third Eye Blind CDs in a cardboard box inside a red Rubbermade bin and mislabel our MP3s so as to disguise them. Hypothetically.
Here’s the excerpt, which feels like Wallace Stevens is alive, writing novels. Again, it’s someone essentially talking to his self and not in a fun or functional way:
I respected you more when you were indifferent to God. You were beset by matters of urgency in your life that took precedence over the lofty speculation of divinity studients and men in pews on Sundays. You didn’t jave the time. You didn’t make it a priority. You formed the notions on the fly, in flashes of grim insight, in brief feelings of certainty that consumed you entirely and then quickly faded into the background. When you die, you thought, you die. Why linger on that unpalatable truth? And the alternative, the alternative was a sham. You hated the institutions and the corruptions and they hypocrises and the evils. You thought it was all a racket designed by the mighty to fleeced the weak and keep them in check. The existence of the numinous, the mystical, the godhead itself — who knows? Maybe. But what evidence was there? You had been chiseled by reason to a diamond point. You were deferential to logic and evidence, skeptical of specious oratory, an enemy of hearsay. At best, you put the possibility in abeyance, knowing that even when one of your cases went to trial, when every detail was presented and picked over, every side aired and attacked and defended, there was slippage, lacunae, things no one would ever know. God was like that. God was a trial. But if pressed you sided with disbelievers and sometimes you even showed contempt for those who spoke with the conviction of the weak and the credulous. You had that luxury. You stood outside of the wind and the rain. Your insights and argunents came to you in prosperity. Death was far off. You could afford to be leisurely. A drink was better than a thought. A meal was better than a conviction. Your family and your work were more meaningful to you than the ministrations of a hundred gods. That is, until you caved….The verdict arrives in doses, century after century, and looks increasingly grim. The world is too old. The soul is the mind and the brain is the body. I am you and you are it and it will always win.
You can buy “The Unnamed” on Amazon, naturally.