Little Brown and Company | 2007 | 400 Pages | List Price: $23.99 | Get it for less at Amazon

Every office has them: whiners, power seekers, idiots, jokesters, workaholics, gossip girls, negative nellies and “different birds.” Working in an office with its own cast of characters from 8–5 every day, I wasn’t so sure reading a book about corporate politics, cubicle antics and hallway dalliances amongst a group of advertising ‘creatives’ navigating their way through a corporate downsizing would be the most enjoyable way to spend my free time.

But that’s where I was wrong.

THEN WE CAME TO THE END, Joshua Ferris’ debut novel and National Book Award Finalist in 2007, was a complete delight, filling my spare time with laugh-out-loud moments that I found myself reading out loud to others. It also has some heart in the most unlikely of places, thus making it an extremely accessible and enjoyable read worthy of promotion even today.

It’s the late 90s and Ferris’ team of Chicago advertising professionals is experiencing its most trying of times: the end of the dotcom boom and lost work. Tensions are high and it’s anyone’s guess who will be “walking Spanish” – the team’s collective term for getting fired taken from the execution-themed song by Tom Waits of the same name. But guessing they are. Guessing, predicting, assuming and hoping it is anyone but them.

Ferris employs the challenging yet highly effective first-person plural narrative and in so doing, brings the reader in as one of the fellow creatives commiserating, praising, judging, mocking, listening and observing with the rest of them. This, combined with a strong character development has the reader feeling like they not only know the team, but that they are a part of it themselves.

When I first cracked open THEN WE CAME TO THE END, I almost wished Ferris had included an organization chart. He’s got a slew of characters doing a whole lot of just about anything but working and it’s a little difficult to keep them straight. But, just as it is for a new employee, after a while you remember that Benny is the storyteller with all the dirt, Amber and Larry are trying to hide an affair and unplanned pregnancy, Janine is devastated by loss, Tom is a little trigger happy with the e-mails and Jim is an idiot. Lynn Mason is the intimidating and elusive boss who may or may not have cancer and Joe Pope is her trusted confidante and middle manager whom the others don’t trust with their life.

And that’s just the beginning.

The agency is all abuzz when it’s learned that the practice of stealing furniture from the recently downsized is actually tracked with serial numbers and monitored by the Office Coordinator. Chatter reaches new heights when an employee continues to show up for work, attends meetings and works deadlines even though he was fired. And, conversation takes on a conspiratorial tone when the creatives begin to question Lynn Mason’s health and a possible missed surgical procedure.

And this only scratches the surface.

Well into the book, Ferris breaks from the first-person plural narrative to tell the perspective of agency head honcho Lynn Mason on a single night of her life. While the departure seems abrupt, it is rather fitting since she’s one of the people most talked about. This interruption gives the reader the unique glimpse of the individual, separate and apart from the office collective, and shows her in her own light, as her own person. It’s a view we rarely, if ever, get to see of those we work with in the real world and one that is marred by our own perceptions and preconceived notions just as it is for the agency creatives.

It is this primary instance, THEN WE CAME TO THE END proves to be more than just a story of funny office antics, but rather a reality check that the people we spend the majority of our time with day in and day out at the office—whom we are certain we know and understand—are sometimes the greatest of strangers and can surprise us the most.

Returning to the first-person plural narrative, Ferris escalates the action to a heart-racing climax in which you will not be able to put the book down. Unfortunately, you will have to do it at some point as THEN WE CAME TO THE END indeed comes to its end. But it’s not without a satisfying close that serves us—the creatives and the reader—very well.

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