“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise.” If there are two sentences that better capture the boom and bust of the dot-com era, I’ve yet to read them. In Then We Came to the End, author Joshua Ferris begins there and weaves a tale that is funny, sad, insightful, slightly terrifying and above all, dead-on accurate in its depiction of the modern workplace.

The story, told in first-person plural (that’s right, it never veers from that “we did this, we did that” voice), tells of the staff at a Chicago advertising agency that is in the first throes of a death spiral as the bottom falls out the dot-com economy. Ferris a University of Iowa and University of California at Irvine graduate, slowly introduces the reader to several quirky characters, populating the office with the usual types, but doing so by going beyond stereotype.

The result is among the best of a small batch of modern novels that capture the essence of what it’s like to actually work for a living. As Ferris mentions later in this interview, various eras over the past several decades spawned their own work-related novels. But those stories, while including work to a greater degree than was standard, sought to strike a balance between work and life. Modern work novels seem to be borne of the depressing revelation that work is life. Few of Ferris’ scenes take place outside the ad company’s few floors in its downtown office building, let alone in the homes of his characters.

Ferris took the time to respond to a few questions for the latest Monday Interview.

TIRBD: Much has been made about the pre-publication hype surrounding your book. Did it worry you that people would come to your book with preconceived notions and expectations, when most first-time novelists are allowed to make their own first impression?

JF: I'd say there are two kinds of readers. The first kind of reader might be called the Back Seat Driver, and the second the Roller Coaster Rider.

The Back Seat Driver comes to a book, about which they've heard a thing or two, knowing the route they expect to be on, the speed at which the tale should be told and how best to handle the tale-telling machine. When the one actually in charge of the storytelling does something displeasing to the BSD reader, there's a lot of angry harping and hard glaring into the rearview mirror. Sometimes, the BSD reader, who wants to turn the wheel here and punch the accelerator there, is so upset he or she flings him- or herself from the backseat, just to get some relief. The author is free to proceed to the destination without resistance – although the BSD reader continues to complain loudly from the shoulder.

The Roller Coaster Rider boards the book knowing a thing or two – the height requirements, the summer buzz – but shows no desire to steer and withholds judgment until the ride is over. The RCR reader patiently abides the duller climbs and happily allows for all the unexpected yanking and double-loop surprises.

Now, this doesn't preclude the possibility that the RCR reader boards a roller coaster that feels more like an endless cross-country trip through the Kansas plains. When that ride comes to an end, there might be cause for complaint. My hope for Then We Came to the End is that it's good enough to keep people in their seats through the last page, and that judgment is bracketed until then, when it's finally free of the preconceptions.

Did you always have first person plural in mind or did you switch up at some point? What did that allow you to do that more traditional POV didn't?

I had the first-person plural in mind from the beginning, but I switched back and forth and for a long while it was in the third person. Those were the novel's lowest days. It lacked any semblance of an original voice. The first sentences sprung to mind – “We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise.” – long after I'd started the book. Then the voice suddenly possessed the same conflicted emotion as any single human being might, while it also contained other, group-specific – I would say colder and more corporate – qualities.

The greatest advantage of using the first-person plural was the way in which it demonstrated the great unreliability of group narration. I've thought long and hard about where to go with reliability post-Nabokov, post-metafiction – and while it's an enduring literary trope, it's not easy to innovate. I certainly haven't done anything new with it, though I might have demonstrated how arch it can be when the narrator is a group of office workers without much of a clue about the personal complications and conflicts of their colleagues.

Speaking of POV, you didn't have a character-narrator who had relationships with the other characters, nor did you have an omniscient narrator to watch over all of them. Did this present challenges in terms of keeping everything straight?

I had a key with the characters' names on it, which I'd look at from time to time. I didn't have trouble keeping them straight once I got to know who was who, which happened for me as I suspect it happens for the reader. The first time I named a character – Lynn Mason, the group's boss – was the first time I encountered Lynn, and I had to remember who "Lynn" was and that she might (or might not) have cancer. In other words, I didn't have a precalculated backstory for Lynn or for anyone else. I learned about them much as you learn about those you might work with – through the slow accretion of detail. Knowledge of someone doesn't happen in a day. Similarly, with a character, it doesn't happen in a sentence. So hopefully the reader starts off somewhat confused, even overwhelmed, by the number of characters, in a mirroring of what it's like to enter a heavily staffed corporate setting. But then as the pages pass, the characters become more meaningful, and you start to understand that Benny is the gossip, Tom the psychotic, Karen the harpy, Joe the supervisor and so on. And then some of those characters start to defy their reputations.

Your book is quite funny, which seems to be a rarity in serious literature these days. What are your favorite comic novels, and, in particular, what is an unsung classic of the form?

I think Ford's The Good Soldier, though not strictly speaking a comic novel, is the novel at its funniest. The extent to which poor John Dowell doesn't understand the situation unfolding around him is high comedy, despite the grim end. I also can't read Nabokov's Pale Fire without being convinced that it is that very funny novelist's funniest novel.

A few unsung classics of the form: A Dog of the South , by Charles Portis. Portis seems to be getting his due lately, so perhaps it's not that unsung, but this is the novel that page for page has the most laughs in it. Amazons: An Intimate Memoir By the First Woman to Play in the National Hockey League by Cleo Birdwell is unsung for various reasons. And My Search for Warren Harding by Robert Plunket is as strange as it is hilarious.

You worked in advertising out of college. How much of this is drawn from that experience? Did this story need to be set in an ad agency, or was that a convenience of your background?

It needed to be set in advertising because advertising is the worst perpetrator of the "we" mentality – buy our product, use our service, join our group – and the individual's conflict with that. More importantly, it needed to be set during the time in which it takes place – the psstttttssssssing of the Internet bubble. I wanted the characters to feel the pressure of endangered jobs so that they suddenly realized the many ways those jobs were important to them. Without that pressure, the quotient of bitching and moaning about work would have been much higher, and the final book less evenhanded about the very real virtues of office life. Setting the book in advertising was key in this respect as well, because advertising was especially hard hit by the dot-com bust.

There are few successful novels about work. Any thoughts about why that is, and why there seem to be more depictions of worklife (TV's "The Office," the film "Office Space" and James Hynes' hilarious novel The Kings of Infinite Space come to mind) these days?

There are times when novels about office life are more plentiful. Something Happened and Revolutionary Road and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit came to define an era of office-bound workers who had the bloodier work of the Second World War to contrast with their paper pushing. The emptiness of a nihilistic greed came to define "work" in the eighties with books like The Bonfire of the Vanities and American Psycho. But none of these books take work on with the kind of life-absorption that actual work, work in the real world, requires of us.

I think that absorption is in vogue now simply because so many people work in offices. It's much more a part of our daily lives – and I don't just mean men going in as the household's breadwinner. As we shift ever more into technology and information, we've entered an era in which nearly everyone has an office experience. So it's becoming more universal, at least in the West, and as such the artists and film makers and television shows are setting their action, sometimes exclusively, in that setting, finding what's universal about it and, at their best, what's idiosyncratic, memorable and meaningful.

Labels: books, Monday Interview