Word: novelization
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...bare hands. It almost belongs more in Joshua Ferris’ debut, “Then We Came to the End”—an acrid satire of the cubicle workplace—or the sitcom “The Office” than in his new novel “The Unnamed.” Though Ferris retains his humor in his new book, he seems to have adjusted its saturation levels. While the comedy of “Then We Came to the End” was tinged with pathos, “The Unnamed?...
...tearing apart his suit, Tim turns the daily routine of changing after work into something eccentric—an act of destruction and frustration. Mirroring this act throughout the novel, Ferris takes the typical—corporate America, illness, marriage, and mortality—and reinvigorates it. “The Unnamed” is a poignant, though not always cohesive narrative. A subplot at Tim’s office involving a murder investigation—a trial that he botched when he took ill—distracts from the account of his illness and its effects on those around...
...kitchen island, his family—again he would lose his family. He stood just inside the door and took stock. Everything in it had been taken for granted.” This is not simply a story about one man and his tragic fall—rather, the novel chronicles a disease as it ravages a man, his family, and his life...
Ferris effectively uses the illness as a foil to the pernicious corporate environment to which Tim belongs, taking up the critique that he began in his first novel, but on a different front. It is this premise of two opposing ailments as they compete for Tim’s life that distinguishes “The Unnamed” from among a field of clichéd and poorly written romantic tragedies...
Ferris is at his best when he focuses on Tim’s struggle with his illness, his job, and his family life. But in intermittently weaving a murder mystery through the novel, Ferris fractures the stylistic, thematic, and narrative unity without adding much to the development of characters or plot. Grisham-like clichés interrupt a compelling account of sickness and struggle. Bland elementary characters from this extraneous and gratuitously blood-spattered thriller story-line are introduced and annoyingly revisited...