Novel of the week: The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

(Reagan Arthur, 310 pages, $24.99)

Joshua Ferris’ career has just taken an unexpected turn, said Jennie Yabroff in Newsweek. Ferris’ semi-comic debut, Then We Came to the End, was a droll portrait of the cubicle denizens of a downsizing ad firm. When published three years ago, it became a best-seller and placed the young author in “Next Great American Novelist territory.” Ferris’ follow-up concerns a high-powered New York attorney, Tim Farnsworth, who’s plagued by an inexplicable compulsion to drop whatever he’s doing and walk until exhausted. What’s most surprising about the new book isn’t that it generates so few smiles. It’s that the hero’s affliction doesn’t appear to be a metaphor for something else. If there’s a “Big Idea” here, it might be that man’s “search for meaning” is always futile.

There is no Big Idea here, said Deirdre Donahue in USA Today. Stripped of both explanation and symbolism, Tim’s malady “comes across as simply a plot contrivance.” As a result, “nothing about this humorless book works.” More disappointing than just another example of a novelist’s sophomore slump, The Unnamed feels like “a cliff dive.” We watch Tim’s life implode, as his loving wife and teenage daughter begin to feel confused and neglected. Yet the fantastical premise makes it impossible to feel that their problems are real, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. The story also has nowhere to go. Having given himself “little choice” but to keep making the protagonist’s situation ever sadder, Ferris resorts to “writerly preciousness.”

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Anyone who underrates what Ferris has achieved with this novel lacks imagination, said Lev Grossman in Time. The walking disease can stand for “any alien element that lives within a marriage and tries to tear it apart,” from alcoholism to workaholism. Ferris’ real subject is the damage, not the cause. The power of his insights marks him as “a writer of the first order,” said Steve Almond in The Boston Globe. Only when Tim completely gives in to his disorder does he reach “his full human measure,” connecting to his family as he never had before. The questions raised by such an unlikely denouement cannot be easily answered. But in a culture in which all of us are tempted to fill our time with soulless activities, those questions “could not be more relevant.”