I don’t get to read as much as I used to. I suppose this is mostly because the majority of my free time is actually spent watching films I’ve missed throughout the year, however I still try to keep relatively current. This past weekend I was at the incredible Denver bookstore Tattered Cover picking up some things; the new Daniel Schorr book, Come to Think of It: Notes on the End of the Millennium, Denis Johnson’s novel Tree of Smoke and the nonfiction collection edited by Ira Glass, The New Kings of Nonfiction when I came across something that made me extremely happy. But, let me back up…
In the early 1990’s I was in school at the University of Iowa pursuing what I thought was the beginning of a fantastic writing career. I had luckily been accepted into their undergraduate writing workshop the first year and was (even luckier) given a fiction scholarship for year two. There, in class, I met Josh Ferris with whom I became good friends. In our second year we had a teacher we thought, well…not so much of, and decided to create our own outside of class workshop, which we held at Iowa City’s infamous Sanctuary Pub. We gathered once a week, made our own rules, brought our own stories and critiqued them in a constructive way we felt we weren’t getting from the school itself.
Fast forward a couple years and I was beginning my work with the Denver Film Festival, Josh was getting his MFA in Creative Writing from UC Irvine, another friend and writer, Grant Rosenberg, was doing some work for the Chicago International Film Festival and Josh came up with the idea to start our own literary magazine—one that focused primarily on the screenplay—and Sanctuary Quarterly was born. It was, sadly, short lived and people moved on.
So, the other day in the Tattered Cover I came across a table of books marked “New York Times 2007 Notable Books of the Year.” And there was Josh’s first novel, Then We Came to the End. And what’s more…it’s a finalist for the National Book Award this year. The reviews are glowing:
"THEN WE CAME TO THEN END, it turns out, is neither small nor angry, but expansive, great-hearted and acidly funny.... "
—New York Times Book Review
"Although Ferris' vision is less grim, it is no less grave; what looks at first glance like a sweet-tempered satire of workplace culture is revealed upon closer inspection to be a very serious novel about, well, America. It may even be, in its own modest way, a great American novel."
—LA Times
"Fabulous....The emotional oscillation as employees strive to stay alive (read: employed) is played out by Ferris with the sort of exuberance and energy that marked Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City," to which THEN WE CAME TO THE END might seem a Midwestern cousin.....Ferris' writing displays a strong descriptive flair, but the greatest asset of "THEN WE CAME TO THE END is the nuance of its narrative voice, which has the gossipy warmth and seeming closeness of a conspiratorial co-worker leaning over a partition to impart the latest rumor."
—Chicago Tribune
"Joshua Ferris' brilliant and incredibly funny debut novel, "Then We Came to the End," lays bare the strange interconnectedness of human cogs in the corporate machine."
—Newsday
There are dozens of similarly toned reviews. I’ve just started it (first person plural!?!) and I hope everybody I know goes and picks up a copy. And, by the way, it's been optioned by HBO, so a scipt is in the works. I'll update that progress as I know it. And Josh, if you see this, email me…your email bounced back. Do you realize you are up against Denis Johnson for the National Book Award?? Jesus.
