Joshua Ferris / Features / Untitled Books

"Any serious writer, any very serious writer, is going to have to dedicate hundreds and thousands of hours to the solitary enterprise of writing."

Joshua Ferris

Joshua Ferris' first book Then We Came to the End created the kind of buzz most writers would kill for, and was met with similarly enviable reviews. Three years later, he's back with The Unnamed, an unsettling take on the road novel. He talks to Viola Fort.

According to a friend in New York, Joshua Ferris has the kind of following usually accorded to new indie bands. His readings are populated with beautiful college girls asking intelligent questions and sighing delightedly at his answers. He is not unknown on this side of the pond either; his debut novel, Then We Came to the End, made a splash on both sides of the Atlantic, and since has been loosely grouped in the public imagination with a tribe of similarly young, cool, serious writers, such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen and Wells Tower, whose stories appear in the New Yorker and whose writing exhibits a certain wry amusement and quirky subject matter.

But it's not his fault he's good looking, and it would do him a disservice to witter about his geek-chic good looks and disarming charm. Unlike certain other writers of similar aesthetic good fortune, there is nothing smooth or knowing about Ferris. He exhibits a natural courtesy and appears to answer honestly, without recourse to the kind of sound bites that will look good in print. He still seems mildly bemused to be asked about 'writing', and equally baffled to have to talk about his life, but gives a little shrug and answers good-naturedly, lacing his conversation with the dry wit familiar from his writing.

The 35 year old was born in Chicago, where he grew up "dysfunctionally." "I came from a long line of divorcees," he quips, without rancour. "Both parents have been married four times." He was "like, nine or something," when he decided he wanted to write. "My parents read to me a lot. The same books over and over. I would always demand the same books," he says. Growing up, he would write his own versions of Mad Magazine, and pen 'really bad Hitchcock parodies'.

After graduating from the University of Iowa with a BA in English and philosophy, he got a job in a Chicago advertising agency. "I knew walking in on the first day that this was where America had been all my life. My parents were pretty much working-class and all of a sudden I enter in to a world of expense accounts, bonuses, full benefits, projects, conference rooms, bottom lines, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations; all that stuff that's grim. But then, also, visits to paper mills to find out how sheets of paper are made; a deeper understanding of why it's important for Microsoft to break in to China, and all of a sudden, the larger world - a world so much larger than both my upbringing and my education - came in to view. And so, I wanted to write about this thing that I had never known existed, and seemed to adequately fit the novelist's ambitions," he says.

It was while working in advertising that the urge to write really took hold. He quit his job and moved to California where he enrolled on an MFA program and spent two years reading and writing. "I never thought I would want to write about advertising because it was such the utterly dull enterprise, "he admits. He still sounds mildly surprised that this should have formed the subject of his first novel. "I guess the answer is I needed distance. I needed to quit, and have a year or two away in order to remember what was actually fun about it and allow myself to be more even-handed with respect to the subjects than I would have been if I'd tried to write it while I was still working," he says.

The result was Then We Came to the End, his sharply funny and highly unusual debut novel about office life. To outside eyes, Ferris arrived on the literary scene as a fully formed Next Big Thing, in much the same way Zadie Smith did, garnering glowing reviews in every major paper and the kind of buzz publishers dream about. The novel follows the a group of office workers at a Chicago advertising agency and his characters are instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever worked in an office, drawn with gentle humour without resorting to stock. Strikingly, it was narrated by a collective 'we': 'We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen.' The world of work is largely ignored in literature, at the most serving as wallpaper for more exciting plot elements. In Ferris' book, work takes centre stage; it is the story.

His second novel, The Unnamed, which is published this month, marches in an entirely different direction. The communal point of view in the first book is abandoned in favour of a resolutely singular one, reflecting the increasingly independent and solitary path taken by its protagonist, Tim Farnsworth. Tim is a wealthy, healthy, good-looking lawyer at the peak of his profession, with a large house, adored wife and difficult teenage daughter. In the opening pages this is all placed in jeopardy by the onset of a strange walking sickness, undiagnosed, unrecognised by medical science; the 'unnamed' of the title. Periodically, without warning or reason, Tim's legs force him up and away from whatever he is doing and do not stop walking until exhaustion intervenes and he collapses into sleep wherever he is - a suburban porch, the back of a car park, an abandoned fast food van. He is powerless to resist the will of his body and frequently finds himself at risk of exposure or at the mercy of whoever finds him. His wife valiantly tracks him, driving day or night to wherever he arrives, crossing state lines and searching the countryside. Inevitably this takes its toll on their home life, and when Tim relapses after a period of remission, he makes the decision to stop fighting the unnamed, and keep on walking.

As with Then We Came to the End, large parts of The Unnamed are concerned with work and working life. "I imagine it will find itself in to every book that I write," he says. "I think that [work] is this monolith of meaning for so many people, and so often neglected in literature." He cites Philip Roth as someone who does it well, particularly a long passage in American Pastoral that describes in unashamed detail how to make a glove. "There was such loving attention to this thing that the characters took so seriously, that all of a sudden they were elevated from characters into real people. And that leap," he leans forward for emphasis, "that leap is enormous."

Tim is a partner at a successful legal firm and wholeheartedly loves his job. It is the interruption to his working life that he finds most distressing when his disease takes hold, and the one corner of his life he fights hardest for. His job provides a framework to his life, and so much of his sense of self is bound up with his career that without it he starts to unravel. It is a sentiment uncomfortably familiar in modern life, and one Ferris recognises himself (though, as he admits happily, he hasn't had a 'proper' job since 2001, "so that's nice."). "Aside from how work factors into fiction, it's also this point of self identity and meaning. If I didn't have it, I don't know what the hell I'd do with myself," he says. "But it's also this way in which we distract ourselves from huge issues."

The Unnamed is a two-tone novel. Throughout the first half, one is unsure what direction Ferris is taking us in, whether we're heading for comedy or tragedy. Funnily enough, the office scenes are the weakest aspect of the book, veering at times into parody. Ferris admits having to work hard to suppress his natural instinct to be funny, but there remains a strange undercurrent of humour; funny in the same way knocking your elbow elicits a laugh, or having your arm twisted just before it starts to really hurt. As the novel progresses, the writing takes a more serious turn, casting off the final vestiges of humour, and in doing so finally finds its stride. Here, at last, Ferris emerges as the writer one hoped he could be; serious, engaging; not simply someone with a talent for clever ideas well-executed, but possessing a capacity for proper, grown-up literature.

Ferris now lives in upstate New York with his wife and "squeaky new" baby son, but he still keeps an apartment in the city. "When that [the country] gets too retiring and catacombish, I have to leave and get down to Brooklyn and feel like I'm still alive."

I ask him to describe his life for me. "My life? Right now? That's a really hard question to ask! Could you answer that question?" he pauses to think, pulling his legs up on to the sofa, as though settling in for an afternoon of TV. "I try every day to engage with writing, be it by reading or actually writing. And the vast majority of days I'm successful, one way or another, and I do that probably to the detriment of everything that would probably be more vivacious." And is life now the way he would wish it? "Wow. Could you answer that one?" he volleys again, laughing. "It's not a bad life." He shakes his head and smiles, then says again, more to himself this time, "I mean, it's not a bad life. "

............................................................................................................

The Unnamed is published by Viking.

............................................................................................................

Thursday, 25 February, 2010