Dilbert Agonistes

There’s no “I” in “team”: Is that why Joshua Ferris’s debut office-angst novel “Then We Came to the End” (Little, Brown, 385 pages, $23.99) is written in the first-person plural? Or is it because none of Mr. Ferris’s team members, not even the more sympathetic among them, is ever quite likable enough to be a proper protagonist?Whatever the case, the decision is to be applauded — perhaps with a Lucite trophy or a Whitman’s Sampler. Mr. Ferris has with admirable dexterity turned the most bland circumstances into something both engaging and, astonishingly, life-affirming. “Life-affirming” is, admittedly, the kind of cliché Mr. Ferris’s characters, worker bees in a shabby, dotbombing, pre-September 11, 2001, Chicago ad agency, traffic in, to varying degrees of personal dejection. But it works.It works because everybody works, and so knows the feeling: “Was work so meaningless? Was life so meaningless? It reminded him of when an ad got watered down by a client, and watered down, until everything interesting about the ad disappeared. Carl still had to write the copy for it. The art director still had to put the drop shadow where the drop shadow belonged. … That was the process known as polishing the turd.”The turd to be polished is: What’s funny about cancer? The team is tasked with a pro bono campaign for a potentially phony breast cancer “alliance.” Rumor has it that the big boss has been diagnosed, though the staff is too childish, bogged down in gossip and pettiness, to find out for sure.The boss, whose condition is detailed in one of the book’s few tongue-out-of-cheek interludes, is one of the book’s only noble characters: “Doing ninety down Lake Shore Drive — that’s a suicide mission, which can sometimes be a dream of rescue. … And for those of you who think Lynn Mason in addition to cancer suffers from the disease the talk shows diagnose as Needing the Man, if you think that’s why she’s parked outside Martin’s office building, then you haven’t yet understood.”Oh, haven’t we? The problem with this cancer gambit isn’t that it’s contrived — what could be more contrived than advertising? — but that it threatens to turn the rest of the characters, the underlings, into cartoons. It makes their concerns — bad marriages, affairs, clinical depression — smaller than they deserve to be, when the lesson of the book is that the smallest concerns — sometimes the only ones available to us — can be important, too.Mr. Ferris’s humor has the same flattening effect. Nick Hornby called the book “awfully funny,” but the funny is mostly awful, the kind of nervous laughter that goes with naked anxiety. In that way, it works, though maybe not as Mr. Ferris intends. In one bit a character telling a story about bookshelves keeps saying “buckshelves” by mistake. It’s not funny at all, and it’s not clear what it’s doing there, but we get the distinct feeling the other characters are glad for a reason to interrupt.Employment in Mr. Ferris’s world is a tale primarily of awkwardness and discomfort — much as in Ricky Gervais’s television series “The Office,” but without a trace of the chilled-out entertainment. It’s more of a permanent “Breakfast Club”: a bunch of people with nothing in common and no escape from one another — unless they want to end up begging on the sidewalk or rampaging through their erstwhile workplace with a handgun.It’s the “no exit” that’s important, not the tedious stapler jokes, the email bloopers, or the operatic crushes. That every employee is terrified to be fired from a job he doesn’t even really enjoy is the cruelest joke of “Then We Came to the End.” The book opens with a ponderous quotation from Emerson: “Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be a unit … but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand?”Ponderous, but who can argue with it?Mr. Ferris’s writing is workmanlike, nothing special, and thus suited perfectly to his subject. His achievement is to show readers, suspicious as they may be of capitalism and corporations, that most find a way in spite of it all to reckon themselves a unit. “By the time we had worked down that round,” says the narrator, “we had reason to remember that Benny had been a good storyteller, and Jim Jackers a good sport, and Genevieve a pleasure to look upon. And Lynn Mason, we all agreed, had been a better boss than any we’d found since.” Garfield and everybody else may go on hating Mondays, but with a little faith, patience, and elbow grease, they’ll probably find the lasagna at the end of the tunnel.Mr. Beck last wrote for these pages on Jonathan Raban’s novel “Surveillance.”

Dilbert Agonistes

Dilbert Agonistes

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