Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Slooooow burn - but worth it in the end - don't give up!, 20 April 2008
This is an intriguing book which provides a dry, original and darkly humourous commentary on the superficiality of modern corporate life and the dangers of the American Dream, as well as a reflection on individual creativity and resourcefulness. It is a very interesting read if you've got time and are feeling generous.
Like other reviewers I was so tempted to can this book after about 100 pages. I'd picked it up for it's quirkiness, but this started to pall for me about a third of the way in. Thank goodness, however, that I made a resolution this year - the National Year of Reading - to always finish any book I start, no matter how painful, no matter how long it takes...
It does take a while, but eventually this book really delivers. In the opening chapters Ferris makes our reading experience as irritatingly meaningless as the superficial lives he describes. As readers we learn something of how it feels to work day-in-day-out in an office where the true meaning of life is obscured by silliness, such as who's got whose chair, or how to write ad copy for products that people don't yet know they desperately need.
Then, about half way through, the style and narrative viewpoint suddenly shift to reveal the heart of the book, to tell part of the story that this book is really about.
The section entitled "The thing to do and the place to be" is a wonderful piece of writing, which surprises us later in the book as well. It describes a 43 year old woman's experience directly before she is due in surgery to have a mastectomy. It is a desperately dark and exceedingly moving piece of writing, which, with a few minor tweaks, would stand alone as a short story within itself - and is worth getting hold of the entire book just to read.
This section marks the pivotal point in the book after which the office characters shift into our consciousness as more real, more sympathetic, and more understandable. In the end we have to know what happens to Lynn Mason, Benny Shassburger, Tom Mota, Chris Yop and Marcia Dwyer - and the closing chapters provide us with intrigue, shock-value and a pleasing denouement.
I've only given this 3 stars because I found it threateningly inaccessible, and many readers will be put off by its initial ramblings. But if you grit your teeth and stick with it you will be richly rewarded for your efforts.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The most I have enjoyed a book in the last year, 29 April 2008
I was amazed to see so many poor reviews of this book. This was probably the most I have enjoyed a book in the last year. I can understand what some reviewers have said about the characters not being engaging at the start of the book. The style is very chatty, and at first you only hear small snippets about each character, and so you build up a picture of them quite slowly. But I was still enjoying the book as an amusing satire of office life.
But for me the book changed into a different gear about half way through with the moving and thought-provoking incident which other reviewers have mentioned concerning the hospital appointment. From that point on I really had to know what was going to happen, not just to that character, but to the others as well. At the end of the book there are elements to the plot which affect everyone in the the office and I thought it was an achievement of the book that I cared about what would happen to ALL the characters, not just the funny or pleasant ones but even those who at first had seemed quite unappealing. Don't think of this as "The Office" in book form. It goes beyond just being an office satire.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
It struggles to get to the end, 2 Aug 2008
Rarely can the choice of voice for a novel have had such mixed results. And rarely has the choice of title seemed so ironic. Ferris opts to write in the first person plural - we - and the effect is very distinctive. Yet from pretty early on the reader cant help but ask: how ever will this come to an end?
For the first couple of hundred pages the choice of voice seems brilliant. The book is a portrait of the mundane mediocrity of modern corporate life: a world where the work is good enough and well paid enough to fear being sacked; and yet not sufficiently compelling to prevent puerile office politics from pervading every moment of the day. 'All today's intrigue was just cheap talk to better dramatize our lives,' says Ferris's collective narrator.
By adopting 'we' as the narrating voice Ferris brilliantly captures the collective ennui, and the sense of an office workforce as a moderately effective sum of dysfunctional individual parts. And this works fine for so long as there is no real plot. But when your voice is plural, and your book has to conjure an ending, what do you do? Whose story in the end will this be?
The answer Ferris probably should have chosen would have been to quit early: allow your book to be a wry and dry mood piece - a timeslice of corporate blandness - and call it a day on the sunny side of page 250. But instead Ferris tries to turn two of the slight plot lines into something bigger. For the first he actually leaves the office environment, goes home with a character, and abandons the first person plural for the third person singular for a while. It feels very odd - as if he has lost faith in his endeavour. He eventually brings the book back to the collective, and then pursues a more bold second plot line. But that too requires him to abandon his central device - and in any case it fails to deliver on the drama the reader thinks is coming.
At that point, with well over 50 pages still to go, you really want to leave this group of hopeless people. But Ferris plods on. He attempts a twist on the 'we' in the very last sentence, but this reader has long since lost interest, and the device just feels faintly irritating.
There is much to admire early on in the acute observation ('He was in Account Management, and, strange for any account person, he had hung something non-Monet on the wall.'), and it is satisfying to have the e-mail driven, faux-creative world of the modern media economy so exquisitely filleted.
But ultimately this feels like a flawed experiment in creative writing - and all the clever sounding people Ferris thanks at the end should have helped him out better.
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