The Unnamed [Hardcover]

Joshua Ferris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 18, 2010

He was going to lose the house and everything in it.


The rare pleasure of a bath, the copper pots hanging above the kitchen island, his family-again he would lose his family. He stood inside the house and took stock. Everything in it had been taken for granted. How had that happened again? He had promised himself not to take anything for granted and now he couldn't recall the moment that promise had given way to the everyday.


Tim Farnsworth is a handsome, healthy man, aging with the grace of a matinee idol. His wife Jane still loves him, and for all its quiet trials, their marriage is still stronger than most. Despite long hours at the office, he remains passionate about his work, and his partnership at a prestigious Manhattan law firm means that the work he does is important. And, even as his daughter Becka retreats behind her guitar, her dreadlocks and her puppy fat, he offers her every one of a father's honest lies about her being the most beautiful girl in the world.

He loves his wife, his family, his work, his home. He loves his kitchen. And then one day he stands up and walks out. And keeps walking.

THE UNNAMED is a dazzling novel about a marriage and a family and the unseen forces of nature and desire that seem to threaten them both. It is the heartbreaking story of a life taken for granted and what happens when that life is abruptly and irrevocably taken away.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2010: It's back. With those words Tim and Jane Farnsworth reenter a nightmare they know so intimately it needs no other description. "It" may not be found among an insurance company's diagnostic codes, but the Farnsworths, a couple made wealthy by Tim's single-mindedly successful legal practice, know it too well: Tim's compulsion, at any random moment of the day or night, to set out walking for hours at a time until he collapses in exhaustion. They've survived two bouts of this inexplicable illness, which began as mysteriously as they ended, and now, as Joshua Ferris's second novel, The Unnamed, opens, they are beset by a third. Ferris's first book, Then We Came to the End, was one of the freshest, most acclaimed fiction debuts of the decade, but he's followed it not with an imitation or extension but with something thrillingly different. Like Tim possessed in one of his perambulatory vectors, Ferris follows his character's condition as far as it leads him, far beyond where logic and loyalty usually take our lives, but always treats it with empathy, grace, and imagination. His language is as exact and poetic as his premise is fantastic, and by the story's end you feel the title refers not only to his hero's strange and solitary disease but also to those elemental but equally inexplicable forces that bind us together through the most difficult turns of our fated lives. --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In Ferris's remarkable second novel (after Then We Came to the End), a life of privilege comes to ruin as a result of a strange and mysterious illness. Attorney Tim Farnsworth thought he had recovered from a disorder that compels him to walk to the point of exhaustion. But now his walking disease has returned and shows no sign of going into remission. His wife, Jane, supportive beyond measure, does everything she can to keep Tim safe during his walks, including making routine midnight trips to pick him up. As the disorder takes increasing control over their lives, however, the sacrifices they make for each other drive them further apart. Ferris manages to inject a bizarre whimsy into a devastatingly sad story, with each of Tim's outings revealing a new aspect of his marriage. The novel's circular aspects, with would-be happy endings spiraling back into chaos and then descending further, integrate Ferris's themes of family, sickness, and the uncertain division between body and mind into a vastly satisfying and original book. (Jan.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Reagan Arthur Books; 1 edition (January 18, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316034010
• ISBN-13: 978-0316034012
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1.1 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (155 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #277,975 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joshua Ferris's first novel, "Then We Came to the End," won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and was a National Book Award finalist. It has been translated into 24 languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Best New American Voices, New Stories from the South, Prairie Schooner, and The Iowa Review. He lives in New York.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

124 of 137 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and terrifying November 1, 2009

By Wanda B. Red VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

It seems clear that Joshua Ferris has a great talent as a writer; after reading this provocative and haunting novel, I am going to order his first book ("Then We Came to the End") and look forward to following his career in the future.

In "The Unnamed," Ferris describes an illness that compels his protagonist (Tim Farnsworth, a wealthy and successful lawyer) to drop whatever he is doing at a specific moment and then walk to the point of desperate exhaustion. Not surprisingly this idiopathic condition (medical professionals remain unable to diagnose or effectively treat it) wreaks havoc on his family life, and ultimately reduces his existence to a war between two parts of his identity -- one of which represents the demands of his body, the other of which stands in for his mind or soul struggling for mastery over those demands. At times, it becomes unclear which voice has the upper hand, which represents "health" or the real Tim, which is even speaking. As the illness recurs, he wanders the countryside of many states and regions of the country, suffering frostbite that disfigures his hands and feet even as his inner self is increasingly disfigured by his madness. One reviewer here calls it a parable; I agree.

I would like to challenge, however, a couple of the observations repeatedly made by reviewers here. First, I didn't find the plot to be so strikingly original. I'm not saying that Ferris isn't the first to think of it in this specific form. But it's a rather simple narrative starting point: What would happen if I gave my hero a compulsion simply to walk out of his life? Taken to its extreme, where might such a compulsion bring him? This is a question that, as we see in the book, ultimately strips away the incidentals of life and leaves us with basic issues of love and identity. By the way, there are plenty of works of literature that work similarly, ranging from Shakespeare's "King Lear," to Jean-Paul Sartre's "Nausea," to Anne Tyler's "Ladder of Years." Create a narrative premise that takes away all the superficial things in life that seem to matter; see what's left.

Second, what that leaves us with -- as readers who become involved in Tim's mental combat -- is the sheer power of Ferris's prose to evoke that inner reality. Unlike some other readers here, I found that prose to be wonderful. No writer should try on this kind of minimalist narrative structure unless he wants to test his ability to create a language that is luminous, transparent, richly evocative both of desperate interior states and of the state of nature. Ferris meets this challenge. His prose is simple, amazing, and beautiful: "He would tell her anything, of course. Yes, of course he would tell her that he loved her and that the soul was vibrant and real and death only an interlude. His banana, how she had taken care of him. She had come to him in far-flung places no matter the time of day or night." I was moved and mesmerized by the writing.

This book demands that the reader give herself over to it as completely as the husband (and wife and daughter) who are at its center surrender themselves to life's whirlwind. It's not an easy book to read, although it is a page-turner. It's an unrepeatable and bravura literary performance.

99 of 119 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars A superb premise that becomes repetitious October 26, 2009

By switterbug TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

The conceit of this book is whether a marriage can sustain an "unnamed" frightening illness that consumes the husband and literally removes him at intervals from his wife and daughter. Tim Farnsworth, a successful, accomplished attorney, has an affliction that intermittently overtakes him. He walks and walks and walks interminably, with no regard to inclement weather or safety hazards. It may be hours, days, or even weeks before he calls his wife, Jane, from a remote location to "pick me up." In the meantime, Jane and their daughter, Becka, live in constant fear when he disappears. Tim has been to every specialty MD and research scientist imaginable around the globe in order to diagnose and treat this illness. However, it remains a mystery. As his illness protracts, it strains the family's coping mechanisms, challenges the binding love, and threatens to unravel them.

This could have been a spellbinding book. Tim's enigmatic illness is an inventive metaphor for any mighty stressor that can bewilder and impale a marriage. Ferris also uses it to explore the differentiation between mind and body and examine the breaking point of the human spirit. He brings alcoholism into the narrative, which is a clever analogy to the walking illness, as it raises many of the same questions, i.e., is it controllable? Can you conquer it with will--mind over body? Or does the body overtake the mind? These issues were implicit in the novel, but meagerly addressed.

Too much narrative is spent on the grinding details of each walking episode and the frustrated search for a cure. Even the family interventions become repetitive after so many attempts. I was slogging through tedious, overwritten, and bloated iterations that descended into melodrama. And Ferris' use of stream-of-consciousness to illustrate Tim's intervals of incoherence was laced with awkward parody. The third person and very detached point of view was precarious to begin with; it eventually declined into one despairing note. Additionally, he threw in some red herrings and manipulated the reader around some close curves that abruptly or insincerely dissolved.

There was so much potential here. I recognize the brilliant symbolism and the harrowing forces that encumber this family. Ferris is an adroit writer, in that he pens masterful metaphors and riveting ideas. But the narrative pounded like a sledgehammer of Tim's misadventures and devolved into a mere sketch of the family. He should have trimmed these episodes and concentrated on penetrating Becka and Jane; instead, he reverts to informational prose, telegraphing what happens and reporting on how Becka and Jane feel. The sequence of events is communicated through dry and hurried exposition as the climax approaches. It does not sustain, even if his purpose was to heighten the poignancy of Tim's absenteeism from his family. We are swallowed in Tim's illness without the balance of inner dialogue and animated experiences of Jane and Becka (which was present at the beginning of the novel but shifted into the illusory). We dryly observed rather than experienced. The climax was colorless and lost luster in the shadows of stream-of-consciousness. The story became sludgy and stultifying.

I appreciate that Ferris experiments with different styles of writing and isn't stuck on one approach. I thoroughly enjoyed his first novel, Then We Came to the End, which was a socio-comic send-up of an ad agency in its final days. But The Unnamed was undisciplined and self-conscious. I encountered authorial autism and self-indulgence and I checked out emotionally way before I came to the end of this novel. This was a heartbreaking family, but the narrative style was unbearably numbing and prevented my surrender to the story. The execution undermined its purpose and thwarted its brittle beauty.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars THE UNNAMED fails to fulfill its bright promise January 25, 2010

By Bookreporter

Format:Hardcover

Joshua Ferris's second novel is a good one striving to be great. Posing the question of what might happen to a comfortable, complacent man stricken with a bizarre and inexplicable condition, it never quite runs to ground any central theme, leaving instead a story that has moments of unaffected poignancy, but in the end drifts off with the wispiness of smoke.

Forty years ago, Tim Farnsworth would have been a character in a Louis Auchincloss novel. A respected litigation partner in a large midtown Manhattan firm, he is immersed in preparing the defense of a client who controls $20 million of corporate business and now faces conviction for the murder of his wife. In the midst of what should be intense trial preparation, Tim is stricken by a mysterious ailment that recurs in four-year cycles and compels him to walk to the point of exhaustion (his early treks evoke Neddy Merrill's frantic journey across Westchester County in John Cheever's "The Swimmer"). "Not an occult possession but a hijacking of some obscure order of the body," as his wife Jane thinks of it, "the frightened soul inside the runaway train of mindless matter, peering out from the conductor's car in horror." When he awakens in the early morning hours in a potato chip truck or curled up next to a Safeway dumpster, Jane, herself a successful real estate broker, leaves their comfortable suburban home to rescue him.

Adorned with every totem of success, Tim's outwardly perfect world quickly unravels. His partners (sketched with dark humor and the insight of a marine biologist assaying the occupants of the shark tank) no longer can tolerate his abrupt departures and remove him from the trial team and eventually the firm. In desperation, Jane handcuffs him to a hospital bed in their home, and details their daughter Becka, an overweight and disgruntled teenager who aspires to a career as a folksinger, to sit by her father's bedside watching endless hours of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" DVDs. "If he just had an expiration date," Jane reflects of her decision to leave Tim in Becka's care, "of course she'd sit with him." Dr. Bagdassarian, the physician Tim "disliked the least of all his doctors," admonishes Jane, "Try your best that he doesn't forget what it means to be human."

Tim's futile search for a cure to what one doctor describes, with unhelpful literalism, as "benign idiopathic perambulation" culminates when he shaves his head and dons a device that looks like a bicycle helmet designed to measure his brain waves. Bereft of hope, he eventually abandons what once was his well-ordered life to embark, in a "brain fog," on a pedestrian ramble from New Jersey to the West Coast.

After its increasingly grim account of the physical and emotional toll of Tim's westward journey, there's an undeniable power, even eloquence, to the concluding 50 or so pages of the novel, retracing his return trip in the face of Odyssean obstacles across America (the focus more on its varied, storm-blasted and sun-streaked landscape than its people) to reunite with Jane: "The path itself was one of peaks and valleys, hot and cold in equal measure, rock, sedge and rush, the coil of barbed wire around a fence post, the wind boom of passing semis, the scantness and the drift." Their intense devotion, especially Jane's desperation (expressed in a moving scene in a roadside diner when Tim offers her both love and freedom with a chilling "I don't want you"), reveals the tensile strength of the bonds that hold couples together in long-term relationships.

THE UNNAMED fails to fulfill its bright promise, not from some complacency that might be understandable in an author fresh from the enormous success of his first novel, but instead owing mainly to the lack of clarity in articulating a compelling vision. Choosing to dangle a multiplicity of explanations for Tim's plight --- from the hollowness of success in contemporary America, to the limitations of medical science, to the mind-body dichotomy, to the challenge of religious belief --- Ferris ultimately abandons the reader to the same uncertain fate. Like Tim, we long for "some measure of understanding, some small answer that might stand in for the clarification of all the mysteries in the world." Perhaps that murkiness was a conscious choice, and while it may inspire many animated book club discussions, it feels less an act of courage on the author's part than a failure of will. Obscurity, even in the name of art, is no virtue.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg ([e-mail])