Second novels, particularly those following wildly successful debuts, are notoriously challenging for writers. Yet Joshua Ferris, whose brilliantly original first novel, Then We Came to the End (2007), was nominated for a National Book Award and won the PEN-Hemingway Prize, makes it clear with The Unnamed that he is no flash in the pan.
Nor is he a one-note novelist. Where his first book was a hilarious and ultimately moving lampoon of the often juvenile behavior that prevails in office cubicle culture, his new novel is altogether darker in tone. It is about a happily married, highly successful Manhattan lawyer, “a handsome, healthy man, ridiculously horse-healthy and aging with the grace of a matinee idol,” whose life falls apart because of a strange illness of unknown origin or cure that compels him to walk to the point of total exhaustion.
When the spirit moves him, Tim Farnsworth takes off, regardless of weather or legal duties. He treks until he drops. If he’s able, he calls Jane, his wife of 20 years, and she drives to the Bronx or the wetlands or wherever he’s crashed to pick him up, often in the middle of the night — but that gets old fast. They try countless doctors, medications, even handcuffing him to the bedpost, but to no avail. (Their teenage daughter wonders why they don’t hire someone to safeguard him, and so do we; we also wonder why they don’t institutionalize him.)
With masterly control, Ferris tracks the dashed hope of remissions and recurrences, the toll on Tim’s marriage and career, and the devastation of his body and mind. His novel is filled with beautiful, haunting images, including a steamy city that’s “a wading pool of cement heat” and “Geese with the white underbellies of bowling pins” squawking overhead. Some passages evoke Jon Krakauer’s similarly intense tale of compulsive adventure, Into the Wild.
The Unnamed is existential nightmare fiction: Tim loses his cozy life and high-powered job, fingers and toes to frostbite, his sanity and, ultimately, his very sense of self. When new tests turn up nothing more specific than the vague
non-diagnosis of “benign idiopathic perambulation,” he thinks, “It was more of the same, exactly what he feared — greater inconclusiveness, additional absence of evidence, the final barrier removed from boundless interpretation. He was anything anyone wanted him to be — a nutcase, a victim, a freak, a mystery.”
As he is taken over by his illness and “the enormity of a crumbling life,” Tim’s struggle becomes a battle between body and soul, each grappling for supremacy. His loss of control — like that of Gregor Samsa, who wakes up as a giant bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis — is emblematic of the human condition, essentially unfathomable and absurd.
Unlike Ferris’ first novel, which was written from a hip, hard-to-pull-off first person plural point of view — we — The Unnamed is written in third-person narrative that generally keeps close pace with Tim’s increasingly deranged psyche, backing away periodically for objective case-history-style updates, such as: “His condition never went into remission again, the walking never ceased.”
Ferris paints another scathing portrait of corporate America (via Tim’s reprehensible law firm), but what deepens The Unnamed and makes it so devastating is the heartbreaking chronicle of the Farnsworths’ marriage and abiding love through cycles of illness and remission (including her cancer and alcoholism). Ferris writes, “The long matrimonial haul was accomplished in cycles. One cycle of bad breath, one cycle of renewed desire, a third cycle of breakdown and small avoidances, still another of plays and dinners that spurred a conversation between them late at night that reminded her of their like minds and the pleasure they took in each other’s talk.”
At once riveting, horrifying and deeply sad, The Unnamed, like Tim’s feet, moves with a propulsion all its own. This is fiction with the force of an avalanche, snowballing unstoppably until it finally comes to rest — when we come to the end, so to speak.
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