What is life if not a quest to find one’s calling while massaging the narrative along the way? This question propels the eponymous protagonist, still struggling to wring meaning from his existence even as it crashes to an end, in A Calling for Charlie Barnes, the fourth novel from Joshua Ferris.
‘It preoccupied him: everyone had a calling. It depressed him: he had not found his. It gave him hope: he might still do so before he died,’ writes the story’s narrator, Jake Barnes, about his father, whose life clock is ticking with a cancer diagnosis. ‘The big kahuna of cancers: pancreatic.’ In contrast to his father, Jake has found his calling as a writer, much to the mystification of Charlie, who thinks writing novels a ‘very silly occupation’.
Ferris, who burst onto the literary scene with Then We Came to the End, a PEN/Hemingway first novel award-winning satire about American corporate life, and was Man Booker shortlisted in 2014 for To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, is on his finest deadpan form here, skewering contemporary America and the shallow values it embodied in the heat of the 2008 financial crash, which is when Charlie Barnes receives his diagnosis.
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