We also do some work

The narrative trademark — or gimmick — of Joshua Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came to the End, is contained in the title: the book is told in the first person plural, which gives this story of Chicago office workers its initial powerful, even oracular, thrust. ‘We were fractious and overpaid,’ the book begins. ‘Our mornings lacked promise.’ Soon comes a key sentence: ‘Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything.’ While the book’s ambition is to capture something of the American turn-of-the-century frenzy, in society and in commerce, essentially it’s about those dozen people and how they get on with each other and still, sort of, hang on to their advertising jobs while there’s always the strong risk of losing them now that the downturn is here; for sure as Monday comes another person will be fired, or, as it is in this particular office discourse, forced to ‘walk Spanish’.