The Writer’s Coin

How we got here: This book has been on tons of the “best of” lists and I can cross it off my “best of” list challenge too.

Here is a book that is described as Office Space meets The Office. Pretty high expectation, right? Well, right off the bat let me say that the book is funny. The humor lies in the way these people (that work in an ad agency in Chicago in the late nineties—”the decline”) communicate and work with each other. Their relationships and their conversations—especially the dialog—are what drive this book forward.

It’s interesting because it’s a book about work but there is very little of the actual work going on. Every now and then we see a character working on “drop shadows” or fonts, but otherwise the work isn’t really part of the story.

Every now and then Ferris will drop a line amidst all the pranks and hi jinx that alludes something bigger, more serious. Something not funny that makes you stop and think about these characters’ lives. It’s really effective because you’re in funny mode the whole time and these lines really hit harder when you don’t expect them.

Then the middle section hits that is a whole different voice and a whole different world. Some people may not like it but I thought it was a great way to show off how clueless these characters are about what they gossip about.

Here’s what the author had to say about it on an interview with Powell’s:

Ferris: I didn’t want to write a book simply about what is funny at work. There are effective TV shows that do that, there’s a funny movie that does it. But what is funny at work is really funny. The foibles of coworkers and office politics create great comedic material. I definitely wanted that in there.

So I needed the comedic element, but I wanted the book to be more. I wanted characters that fought against the we point of view, who defied the collective judgment of the individuals that comprised that collective. The best way I knew how to do that, to reveal the limitations of that point of view, was to present, unadulterated, unmediated, one character’s night. A very dramatic night.

I needed to make it work technically. Hopefully, it does. It might seem to be jarring at first because it breaks that point of view, but it was important for readers to get the sense that the point of view is not a complete authority.

It is jarring, but jarring is something he does well here and it’s a very effective tool to get the book away from just being a funny book about work.

The book is also written in the “we,” which is extremely rare. Who the “I” is is never explained until the end (sort of) and again, it’s one way of grouping these characters together as a kind of “generation” of sorts during that time.

Weird as it is, the end is very nostalgic. As characters start leaving the table and disappearing, I was right there with Benny as he tried to get everyone to stay, for it not to end yet, to keep going. It makes you realize how tenuous and strange the relationships you have at work really are.

All in all, this is a funny book about work and about life. And those days where it’s very dark and you don’t want to go to work and you hate everyone and wished they would all just leave you alone? That’s in here too.

The book also has a really cool website that I think fits with the book’s concept really well, check it out here.

My favorite lines:
“And just as we said that, we caught ourselves talking about such things as which chair Marcia would be better off being caught with, and we realized then how far we had fallen.”

“We never disliked Joe more than when he had information that we had, too, which he then refused to tell us.”

“Tom had had a wife who was right all the time, too, and so he could understand Carl’s desire to deprive the person who loves him most the righteousness of confirmed knowledge.” 

Coming up Next: Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson

Tags: joshua ferris, then we came to the end review