I am not one of the bookish set that raved on about Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End, but that may only be because I have not yet read it. If his new The Unnamed is any indication, I should go out and get a copy immediately. Mark Sarvas's gush sealed the deal on my picking up The Unnamed, a novel about a high-powered New York attorney who contracts an illness which compels him to walk without stopping until he drops in his tracks from exhaustion. Or is it an illness? Perhaps is his psyche calling out for a break from the rat-race. And no, the treadmill doesn't work. He has to cover ground. '...a dazzling book about a marriage and a family...' the jacket waxes on. Dazzling maybe, but no, it's not. As I read it, this book is about an individual and nature. His nature. This is King Lear, and Ferris writes some chapters that are a worthy analogue to Lear's howl on the moors. Tim's drive forward is bigger than marriage, it's bigger than career, it's more essential than family. He walks right out of a multi-million dollar case he is in charge of for his law firm, he sacrifices body parts to frost bite. I'm reading Freud's seminal work on understanding the mind through dreams for a class right now. Our favorite Viennese Victorian doctor envisions the events of dreams as encoded messages about those deepest wishes and fears we cannot give voice to. The mind symbolizes them (says Freud) so that in their disguise they get past the censor (our conscious mind) and find a partial expression that can then be interpreted. That is what Ferris has created in The Unnamed, a Freudian symbol for the inexorable drive forward. Sometimes that drive is the life force itself. Sometimes it can take on a more destructive character but can be sublimated, kept within the lines culture approves of, as career ambition. But then there are those other times that it takes on a more elemental cast. Witness, for example, Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. What possessed him, we ask? Well, something bigger than the either his marriage or the presidency - institutions that we imagine should be strong enough to keep our natures in line.
So much of who he was was involuntary...The only control over the coursing world that he retained in his littleness was his selfless refusal to turn.Every drive forward, we would like to think, can be answered by turning around. Except at those times when it can't. This beautiful, sad, strong novel is about those times.
3 comments:
Thrilling to hear. I was blown away by And Then We Came to the End - I could not believe he pulled it off - when you read it, you'll see what I mean. A group narrator? "We"?? But oh is it perfect and he completely sustains it. I am actually jealous - I wish I had written that book. He is so talented that I was hoping he wasn't just a "one trick pony" and I very much look forward to reading his latest.
There was a moment or two where I worried that it was a one-gimmick book, but it turns out to be otherwise. He's also very easy to read. I can see you really liking this book.
I'll have to read this. There's actually a guy here in LA who had a heart attack or stroke and can't stop walking. Normally he walks without a shirt, and in inclement weather he walks with a jacket, but always reading the paper and hurrying. It's some kind of disorder. Good to hear this so great....
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