Some books don’t wrap it up well (The Last Time They Met by Anita Shreve, Becoming Strangers by Louise Dean, A Certain Age by Tama Janowitz and many, many others) and they leave the divination to the book club.
The workplace novel Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris is the only book that I have ever read where the narrative is constructed so that one of the characters explains what the book is about to the reader (at the end of the book). The construct sort of works (and it is a surprise). Ultimately, it makes the book tight without a single loose end.
On the back cover it is called the “the Catch-22 of the business world”. I don’t think that is accurate. The book is mostly funny’ish, but mostly it is serious and only a little outlandish (but, here is the thing, not outlandish enough to be funny in a Joseph Heller sort of way).
I really did want to read a book about the workplace that would make me laugh so next up it Company by Max Berry.
Now, even though Ferris didn’t nail the humor throughout, one brilliant part of the book is that it is predominantly narrated by a collective “we” and that is cool and often funny.
Literally, almost all of the book is written in this voice:
Half the time we couldn’t remember three hours ago. Our memory in that place was not unlike that of goldfish. Goldfish who took a trip every night in a small clear bag of water and then returned in the morning to their bowl. What we recalled was that Karen didn’t let up on the story, day after day for an entire week, and when that week was over, we all had a better idea of Joe than we had gotten in his first three or four months. (63)
I like the collective “we” and was annoyed when he reverted perspective to the individual point of view. While I was reading it, I thought the author could have cut out the entire section titled “The Thing to Do and the Place to Be” (so boring it made my eyes bleed). But, then, at the end of book, one of the characters explains why it has to be there and I have to agree (I just don’t like it).
