Word: tims
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...While the comedy of “Then We Came to the End” was tinged with pathos, “The Unnamed” is tragic, but gilded with heartbreaking humor. While previously Ferris might have left this character shouting obscenities or doing something equally outrageous, here Tim is left collapsed in the arms of his wife, as eviscerated as his expensive work-wear...
...Tim Farnsworth, a partner at a high-profile Manhattan law firm, is afflicted with sudden bouts of uncontrollable walking. Despite the strong deterrent of an East Coast winter and the responsibilities he may have to his family and job, Tim walks for hours—unsure of his destination, unable to stop, and unconcerned with his bodily pains. Eventually these hours become years. Despite countless visits to doctors and more dubious specialists, the cause of the walking remains unknown and the disease unnamed, thus the novel’s title...
...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...
Exasperated by the illness’s return, Tim rips his suit just as it will tear apart his seemingly perfect life—complete with an attractive, loving wife, a high-paying job that he loves, and an 8-bedroom mansion in the suburbs. Sensing his oncoming relapse, Tim contemplates what he stands to lose: “He was going to lose the house and everything in it. The rare pleasure of a bath, the copper pots hanging above the kitchen island, his family—again he would lose his family. He stood just inside the door...
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...