Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (2007)

Then We Came to the End is a workplace novel set in the very early 2000s, when the boom cycle of the 90s starting reversing and businesses began massive layoffs; here, the business in question is a Chicago-based advertising firm.

Not only does the book employ an ensemble cast of characters, the idea is carried out to the extreme: it's narrated throughout (except for one chapter that's explained late in the book) with the collective plural. It might seem impossible to sustain a "we" narrator throughout, but the book pulls it off with surprising success. The group's members include the agency's creatives—the writers and designers. Characters outside that group are "they."

Layoffs threaten everyone in the group, and some individuals face pretty serious problems: an unplanned pregnancy, a bad divorce, a missing child. Mainly this is a very funny book, but darkness is everywhere around. The "we" provides a strange sort of middle-distance perspective on this, as in the episode when the creatives are putting together a flyer for the missing child. They fall into treating it like any other job, arguing over kerning, pumping "MISSING" up just a little, tweaking and re-tweaking the photo.

"I think we're losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here," said Genevieve.

But we feared that if [the photo] was washed out, people would look right past the flyer.

The book is full of tangles like these. It's funny, but horrifying, but they mean well, but...No one gets pigeon-holed here.

I really liked how well Ferris evokes the workplace with its in-jokes and unspoken traditions, its catchphrases, the things people hate about work and love about it. He also captures a particular time and place that rung very true to me. I was working in a boutique PR firm at the time this is set, and I was laid off around the same time the novel's characters are getting shitcanned (they love that word). The endless struggle to fill billable hours when there's no work to do because clients are disappearing is one I remember well.

At first Then We Came to the End comes off hipsterish and ironic, a stance I've gotten tired of, but soon the book's real warmth, its insights about lonely people struggling toward or away from each other, becomes very affecting. This was an ambitious novel to write, and Ferris pulls it off amazingly well.