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Product Description: No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.
With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.
Amazon.com: Amazon Best of the Month Spotlight Title, April 2007: It's 2001. The dot-com bubble has burst and rolling layoffs have hit an unnamed Chicago advertising firm sending employees into an escalating siege mentality as their numbers dwindle. As a parade of employees depart, bankers boxes filled with their personal effects, those left behind raid their fallen comrades' offices, sifting through the detritus for the errant desk lamp or Aeron chair. Written with confidence in the tricky-to-pull-off first-person plural, the collective fishbowl perspective of the "we" voice nails the dynamics of cubicle culture--the deadlines, the gossip, the elaborate pranks to break the boredom, the joy of discovering free food in the breakroom. Arch, achingly funny, and surprisingly heartfelt, it's a view of how your work becomes a symbiotic part of your life. A dysfunctional family of misfits forced together and fondly remembered as it falls apart. Praised as "the Catch-22 of the business world" and "The Office meets Kafka," I'm happy to report that Joshua Ferris's brilliant debut lives up to every ounce of pre-publication hype and instantly became one of my favorite books of the year. --Brad Thomas Parsons Customer Reviews: Rating: 
Date: 2008-07-04
A Very "Male" Book
I liked this book. The first person plural was effective, not annoying, and disturbing in retrospect. The characters were real and yet not stereotypical. There were a few humorous parts. That said, I found this to be a very "male" book with little perspective of a woman's struggles in the workplace - even with Lyne's "interlude." Not that Ferris is under any obligation to tap into the female office psyche, of course. Just that I would have found the novel more enjoyable, I think. It was a bit dry. Some people already being driven insane by corporate culture might want to avoid it until they retire. Too close to home and all that. Rating: 
Date: 2008-07-02
We can't stop thinking about this book.
When we finished reading this terrifically funny debut novel, we thought about our co-workers at Metal Center News and McWilliams-Watermark and INS Advertising. We thought about the people's whose apartments we cleaned and the actors we acted with, and we wondered how they were doing right now and if they were happy and if they looked anything like what they looked like back then.
We laughed a whole lot in a "Catch-22" kind of way when we read this book and we were also surprised how serious and sentimental it was. But we also think that the publisher went a little too far with the bright yellow cover and the little cartoon characters. It's not a sitcom, we thought. It's literature!
One more thing, just between us: what's the last line mean, anyway?
Rating:
Date: 2008-06-22
SO damn good
Love the first-person plural. Love the microscope-eye view of office living, written with honesty and wit. Love the strong characterization, the whacky plot, the setting which by its very banality is sublime. The book is strongest when it's relating the way the office's boss spends the night before she's slated to go under the knife. So naked, so raw, so powerful, so true. I just love it! Rating:
Date: 2008-06-15
Fun, inconsistent 2007 novel on life at a failing ad agency
Joshua Ferris' acclaimed debut novel depicts a fading millennial Chicago advertising agency. The first-person narrator is an anonymous employee who seems to express the collective thoughts of the group while walking the reader around the office and sharing stories. Ferris populates this fictional agency with a richly drawn cast of employees. The accounts of office minutia are usually hilarious and realistic (one employee tries to pass an entire day without touching his computer keyboard) but occasionally neither (the tiresome discussion of office chair switches). The team faces the constant threat of layoffs (they call it "walking Spanish") during the post-Internet bubble advertising slump. Agency owner Lynn's struggle with breast cancer is a key theme of the novel. A segment of the book abruptly shifts from the office to a third person omniscient view of Lynn that, while dignified, disrupts the flow of this fictional work. This strong modern novel is recommended: I read this a few months ago and it still occasionally is in my thoughts. Rating:
Date: 2008-06-14
dark comedy
I enjoyed this black comedy of cubicle life. The first part entranced me with its dry humor and spot-on depiction of the lives of corporate drones. The middle section was darker -- an more searching exploration of the psyche of those who confuse their work with their lives -- or more accurately have no lives. Then the jocular tone returns for the final section.
The author is very skillful in the way he gradually brings the various characters to life, although they do remain someone opaque. We get to know them in a similar way to the way we get to know our own work colleagues. We see their little tics and peculiarities but we only see part of them -- the work part. The rest remains unknowable to us.
This book has been compared to "Catch 22." I don't think it's quite up to that level, simply because the subject matter -- the folly of war versus the folly of office life -- can't be compared.
Having said this, this is a fun read -- a little sad, a little funny, a little disturbing.
For more on me and my book The Nazi Hunter: A Novel go to www.alanelsner.com |
