Word: novelled
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...lesser writer, a development like that would be enough to hang the rest of the novel on. You couldn't resist it: enter the charismatic, avuncular neurologist who patiently leads Tim back into the light, dispensing wisdom and learning some life lessons of his own along the way. Maybe he cures Tim. Maybe he runs off with Jane. Who knows? But none of that happens in The Unnamed. Instead, Jane throws the letter in the trash without even finishing it. That's how crushed her spirit is. Even the possibility of hope is too much for her to bear...
Ferris' first book, Then We Came to the End, published in 2007, was a knockout - a comic novel set in an office and told in the first person plural by a watercooler Greek chorus. That device was either a lucky stunt or a carefully calibrated masterstroke. Either way, a sophomore slump wouldn't have been surprising. Even Zadie Smith had The Autograph Man. But Ferris - who's a year older than Smith and approximately as good-looking - has gone the other...
...interested in the blast radius around the sickness, the damage it does to Tim and his family. The longer it resists a cure or even a diagnosis, the more dense the walking becomes with multiple meanings, until it's a pulsating black hole at the center of the novel. It could stand for depression, mania, lust, rage, any alien element that lives within a marriage and tries to tear it apart. It could stand for the author's compulsion to write...
...Unnamed isn't a grim novel, exactly, but it's grim-ish. Only rarely does Ferris show the nice touch with a comic digression that he gave free rein to in Then We Came to the End. (Though there is a one-off about a man named Lev with a sexual fetish involving exotic snakes, which I choose to accept as an hommage à moi.) It's as if Ferris is testing his range to make sure the bass end is there as well as the comic treble. It's present and accounted for and suitably rich and profound...
...Society, a scalding view of gang-plagued Los Angeles. Their next film, Dead Presidents, depicted the scars of Vietnam on a returning vet. After the documentary American Pimp, they sent Johnny Depp in pursuit of Jack the Ripper in the 2001 From Hell, based on an Alan Moore graphic novel. Their films exude a tone of lawlessness and despair. The message: whether it's Victorian London or a saloon town 30 years hence, sooner or later every place is Detroit...