The Funny Thing About Work Itself It Was So Bearablethe Dreariest Task Was Perfectly Bearable

The End begins like this: "We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all too infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day."

Joshua Ferris' debut novel is the Catch-22 of the Office Building. Set on the decline of a Chicago ad agency, it's absurdly hilarious, yet like Catch-22, this hilarity is protective in nature. Without it, we, as readers, might be too distraught with the bleakness we find in the modern office.

To be fair, an office building is not too terribly equatable to the war-time conditions of Pianosa. Yossarian is pissed because he can't see the sanity in getting up in a plane to die. The collective conscious of Then We Came To The End is worried about survival in a professional sense. They don't want to lose their jobs. However Ferris ties the profession to life. It becomes equatable. As the opening passage demonstrates, the tedium of the office is insane. Yet they stay in it. The "impulses" are haunting. Yet they aren't enough to enter life without security, without the ability to get to the "issues of the day."

The opening passage represents the height of the agency. They are successful. But this quickly fades as one by one employees are laid off. In an act of repossession, the workforce rephrases it as 'walking Spanish.' Down the hall, box of office memorabilia in tow, the novel is the tale of everyone at this agency walking Spanish.

At the center of TWCTTE is the narrative collective conscious. Written in the first person plural P.O.V. (the 'we' construction), Ferris lumps together the misgivings and experiences of the plebeian tier of Art Directors and Copywriters, and simultaneously forces the reader into their conscious experience. The crutch is that characters periodically jump out of this 'we' to perform their solo narratives. Each of these characters is distilled into something unique: the manic Tom Mota, Benny, the social epicenter of office gab, Marcia and her self-acclaimed bitchiness, absent minded Chris Yop, the axiom spitting Hank Neary, and many others all make the 'we' personal. As Ferris lets the narrative of each of these characters into the spotlight, they shift out from the 'we' consciousness and into their own. They become briefly unique, only to reenter the 'we' as another character's story assumes the stage. The voice behind the 'we,' the actual narrator himself, is never revealed. He never steps out into his own story.

The collective 'we' lines itself against Lynn Mason and Joe Pope. These characters never have a place within the 'we' community that Ferris creates, and as such they are the inadvertet antagonists. Lynn Mason is the ad agency's representative head honcho, one of the partners, and the one who is causing all the "Walking Spanish." Lynn Mason, we discover, also has breast cancer. She creates a pro bono project just to keep the firm busy. In the middle of the novel, Ferris wheels out into the story of Lynn, abandoning the first person plural P.O.V. to instead capture her isolation, her fear of hospitals, the professional nature of her relationship with her lover. Right in the middle, as the reader starts to align themself against the antics of Lynn, Ferris won't let us. Joe Pope is the liaison between Lynn and everyone else in the office. Joe Pope is a good guy with a bad job. He's Heller's Major Major, alienated by rank from his peers. He's humanized through the immaturity of the 'we.' In doing this, Ferris is muddling the lines between good and evil in this narrative, he's not letting 'fault' enter into the equation. Instead, he constructs office life more fully. And he does it wonderfully. Following are passages from the novel that hit on some of the bigger challenges of this lifestyle choice.

On regret:

"What should I have told the man?" Benny asked us, long after his uploading was complete, and all we could agree on was the sight of Brizz smoking outside the building in winter in nothing to keep him warm but his sweater vest. That was a story Brizz owned, but was it a story? Or we might have told him about the talk with the building guy, but that wasn't much of a story either. To be honest, what we remembered most about Brizz was his participation, along with the rest of us, in the mundane protocols of making a deadline — Brizz's nicotine stink in a conference call listening to a client's change in directions, Brizz sitting behind his desk with his reading glasses, carefully and methodically proofreading copy before an ad went to print. Hard to build an anecdote out of that. Good god, why had nobody stopped him? Why had we never, not one of us, stopped, turned around, and sad, Knock knock. Sorry to interrupt you when you're proofreading, Brizz. Why had we not gone in, sat down? Yeah, you smoke Old Golds, you keep a messy car — but what else, Brizz, what else? Would closing the door help? What fucked you up as a kid and what woman changed your life and what is the thing you will never forgive yourself for? What, man, what? Please! We walked past. Brizz never looked up. How many times did we end up down at our own offices, doing pretty much the same thing, preparing for some deadline now come and gone, while Brizz lived and breathed with all the answers a hundred feet down the hall?

"He ate two baloney sandwiches for lunch almost every day," Benny said to Phil. "That's what I remember about your brother the most."

On compassion:

He unpacked his supplies — two cans of white house paint, a deep-well roller tray, two roller heads, and a telescoping extension pole. He sipped from the Thermos lid as he mixed and poured out the paint and the fumes rose up to greet him. The faint sun barely touched on him as he walked the length of the scaffold, running the roller up and down the face of the billboard, working efficiently and thoroughly to cover the girl's fading image. It had been up there a number of months, all through the bad midwestern winter and the start of the spring rains, puckered in places, bubbles of paint cracked in half. Thanks to the extension pole, he covered more than he thought he would, but he still had a good bit to go yet, so he set the roller down and finished the martini and took out a paintball gun from the backpack. He poured a second martini and then loaded the gun. From his position on the scaffold, he could see the girl's face only at a steep angle, which prevented him from knowing exactly how to aim. But he had brought with him plenty of white pellets which he had chosen to match the house paint, and as he sipped the second martini and the sky announced the beginning of another empty, interminable weekend, he walked back and forth along the planks loading and shooting, covering over the dead girl's image one bitter blot at a time, because his complaints to Jane Trimble had gotten him nowhere — and because in conversation the previous morning, Janine said she couldn't bear to look at it one day longer.

On routine:

There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough fto make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain committed to walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their PowerBars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within an arm's length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we could make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort.

But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work.

On acceptance:

But it didn't happen overnight. It took weeks, it took months, and that we mustered up the oomph to start over again at new agencies was a testament to our tenacity. It was a sign that buried beneath al lthe bitching, there were parts of the job we loved. It was proof we needed the money.

[skip 17 pages]

The funny thing about work itself, it was so bearable. The dreariest task was perfectly bearable. It presented challenges to overcome, the distraction provided by a sense of urgency, and the satisfaction of a task's completion — on any given day, those things made work utterly, even harmoniously bearable. What we bitched about, what we couldn't let lie, what drove us to distraction and consumed us with blind fury, was this person or that who rankled and bugged and offended angels in heaven, who wore their clothes all wrong and foisted upon us their insufferable features, who deserved from a just god nothing but scorn because they were insipid, unpoetic, mercilessly enduring, and lost to the grand gesture. And maybe so, yes, maybe so. But as we stood there, we had a hard time recalling the specific details, because everyone seemed so agreeable.

I realize these selections are a bit bleak. They represent the various dog eared pages still creased in my copy of Then We Came to the End. To be honest, they're editorialized selections that have some bearing on where I personally sit in life. Within the confines of a personal blog though, I allow myself the slip from accountability that a true analysis would require. Joshua Ferris, as these passages help illuminate, has created a novel not just assertive in its analysis of the office lifestyle, but on life itself. TWCTTE, in its move between all the perspectives of each of its characters, in its inclusiveness of the reader in its 'we' construction, in the way it makes one laugh out loud moments after evoking unexpected pangs of sadness, is a truly successful novel. It reminds us of ourselves.

rothmontering.blogspot.com

Source: https://seanconned.wordpress.com/books/2010-2/joshua-ferris-then-we-came-to-the-end/

Share this post