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Then We Came to the End: A Novel Paperback – February 26, 2008

by Joshua Ferris (Author)

412 customer reviews

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No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.
With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"What looks at first glance like a sweet-tempered satire of workplace culture is revealed upon closer inspection to be a very serious novel about, well, America. It may even be, in its own modest way, a great American novel." ―Los Angeles Times

"A masterwork of pitch and tone. . . . Ferris brilliantly captures the fishbowl quality of contemporary office life."―The New Yorker

"Not too many authors have written the Great American Office Novel. Joseph Heller did it in Something Happened (the one book of his to rival Catch-22). And Nicholson Baker pulled it off in zanily fastidious fashion in The Mezzanine. To their ranks should be added Joshua Ferris, whose THEN WE CAME TO THE END feels like a readymade classic of the genre. . . . A truly affecting novel about work, trust, love, and loneliness."―Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times

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.

Product details

Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (February 26, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 031601639X
ISBN-13: 978-0316016391
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.2 x 8.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 412 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #468,213 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #482 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Humor > Business & Professional
- #1270 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Satire
- #2132 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Humor

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If you like Office Space and The Office, this is the perfect book for you.

August 21, 2016

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

If you like Office Space and The Office, this is the perfect book for you. Same office dynamics, yet more in depth look at the corporate world and the life of the cubicle dwellers. And yes, turns out we really don't know anything about the people we work with, the same people we spend 8-12 hours, 5 days a week...We don't know what they shaped them, what motivates them, what their real fears are.

4 people found this helpful

Comment

It had some funny parts, because if you've ever worked in "cubicle ...

April 5, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I'm not exactly sure what to say about this book. It had some funny parts, because if you've ever worked in "cubicle land", you can identify with some of the characters and situations. But it's also kind of a downer book: layoffs, office drama, jerks at work, etc. In a way it's just like going to work except you're sitting at home reading a book. It wasn't great, but not horrible either. The fact that I didn't put it down says something I suppose, although I've only ever quit reading one book in my life because it was so poorly written. I don't think it was good enough to recommend it to anyone else.

5 people found this helpful

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Cai Yixin Jeremy

Then We Came To The End

January 17, 2010

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Joshua Ferris, relatively unknown in the world of Literature, comes up with one of the most audacious first novels in quite awhile. In my estimation, Then We Came To The End is the best literary novel of 2007, surpassing even Tree of Smoke, national book award winner of the same year. While the former doesn't even begin to touch the latter in terms of pure, literary ambition, it stands higher for me because of its immoderate amount of humor.

Like most books (or other forms of mass media for that matter) focusing on the nuances of the working world, this one goes the comedic route. Reading through the first chapter, you get a vivid sense of where Joshua is going. The main characters were introduced and the overall tone was established. It is then that the humor kicks in.

But it isn't the kind of humor that hits you as screwball or outrageous, the origin of the humor stems from the fact that every single one of these characters are caricatures of ourselves and of people we have perhaps met in our very own work spaces. That, to me, was what made the book funny. Work life, especially in commercial companies like the anonymous advertising firm described in this book, is funny in its very nature. The embarrassment of having your personal quirks on display for your fellow professionals to see, as is the urge to laugh at exhibitions of the same, constitutes much of the material in this book.

Compounded with a good sense of structure, a wondrously modern prose voice and a deep feel for the characters, the story captivates you and brings you to a place of identification with both the characters and the situations they find themselves in. It is this sympathy that provokes us to turn the pages, even though at times we wonder where the plot may be taking us. But it does payoff in the end with no small measure of satisfaction.

The satisfaction I get from this book cannot be understated, or overstated. It has given me glimpses of myriad memories from my own working life. Sometimes, in life, we get caught up in our career and overlook the relationships of the colleagues we see day in, day out within the cul-de-sacs. This book does have that déjà-vu magic. And above all, it succeeds as an enjoyable piece of literature. Few books nowadays can claim to do that.

2 people found this helpful

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True, funny and touching

December 2, 2008

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The unnamed narrator of this book kept me laughing and nodding my head for the whole ride as he took me through the final tumultuous weeks suffered by the anxiety-ridden employees of a Chicago advertising firm. Business is down and layoffs are on, and all of them are just clinging to the life-raft, praying they won't be next and agonizing over what they'll do if they are. For the most part it's a hysterically funny and usually unflattering inspection into each character, mixed in with more serious moments, from Tom and his unbearably verbose e-mails to Lynn's possible breast cancer (does she or doesn't she have it?) to Amber and Larry's sordid affair, to the tyrannical serial number system used to monitor the precise whereabouts of every single chair, bookcase and printer. It's a brilliant breakdown of why co-workers really ARE like family, in that you can love and hate them with equal passion several times over - just in the course of one day.

Like the movie Office Space - one of my all-time favorites - this might be one of those "you had to be there" kind of things, meaning that to fully appreciate it you may have to have worked in an office environment; i.e., the world of horrific coffee, unproductive meetings, cheap carpet, unreasonable deadlines, ergonomic chairs, romance rumors, post-it notes, and the inevitable waves of layoffs. Since that's been my world for far too long now it was as familiar to me as if I'd written it myself. It's dead-on and in some ways even made me appreciate the little sub-culture created around one's workplace, one you're often not really aware of as its own special little world until you're suddenly booted from it.

I enjoyed it and will probably re-read at some point.

Then We Came to the End was shortlisted for the 2007 National Book Award.

4 people found this helpful

Comment

Adperson's anomie

November 5, 2008

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The clever and sophisticated people in this novel begin by acting in petty and childlike ways. They are a group of workers in an advertising agency in Chicago.. Augusten Burroughs's "Sellevision" and Scott Adam's Dilbert strip come to mind. The book is often mordantly funny, although it includes the murder of a child, a death from cancer, a death in military action, and bouts of depression and mental illness. These actions are effectively counterpointed with concerns about such matters as ownership of a chair or decorating an office cubicle.
As the story goes on the characters mature and come to respect each other. I had a vague feeling that there's a deep moral in there somewhere, if I was smart enough to understand it. It uses some narrative gimmicks of the kind I usually dislike, but which are used so effectively that I was drawn in. One schtick is to use the first person plural as a point of view. A large part of the story is told by "we" and not until the last sentence is the reader told who "we' is. Other parts are POV of separate characters, and then, towards the end one of the characters reads from the novel he has been writing about the others. It's complicated but it works.

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