Then We Came to the End: A Novel Summary and Reviews

Then We Came to the End: A Novel
by Joshua Ferris

Then We Came to the End: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Joshua Ferris
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-02-26
ISBN: 031601639X
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Back Bay Books

Book Reviews of Then We Came to the End: A Novel

Book Review: Adperson's anomie
Summary: 5 Stars

The clever and sophisticated people in this novel begin by acting in petty and childlike ways. They are a group of workers in an advertising agency in Chicago.. Augusten Burroughs's "Sellevision" and Scott Adam's Dilbert strip come to mind. The book is often mordantly funny, although it includes the murder of a child, a death from cancer, a death in military action, and bouts of depression and mental illness. These actions are effectively counterpointed with concerns about such matters as ownership of a chair or decorating an office cubicle.
As the story goes on the characters mature and come to respect each other. I had a vague feeling that there's a deep moral in there somewhere, if I was smart enough to understand it. It uses some narrative gimmicks of the kind I usually dislike, but which are used so effectively that I was drawn in. One schtick is to use the first person plural as a point of view. A large part of the story is told by "we" and not until the last sentence is the reader told who "we' is. Other parts are POV of separate characters, and then, towards the end on of the characters reads from the novel he has been writing about the others. It's complicated but it works.

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