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Then We Came to the End
A Novel
by Joshua Ferris
Ferris's humorous debut novel tells the story of collection of copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency confronting layoffs at the end of the '90s boom with gossip, secret romances, elaborate pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks.
Little, Brown and Company, 400 pages
03/01/2007
$23.99
ISBN: 0316016381
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Los Angeles Times Darcy Cosper
What looks at first glance like a sweet-tempered satire of workplace culture is revealed upon closer inspection to be a very serious novel about, well, America. It may even be, in its own modest way, a great American novel.
Washington Post James P. Othmer
Categorizing Then We Came to the End as anything other than an original and inspired work of fiction would be doing it a great disservice.
Publishers Weekly
At once delightfully freakish and entirely credible, Ferris's cast makes a real impression.
PopMatters Michael Upchurch
Not too many authors have written the Great American Office Novel...To theirranks should be added Joshua Ferris, whose Then We Came to the End feels like a readymade classic of the genre.
Daily Telegraph Elena Seymenliyska
A first novel from America as impressively confident as Donna Tartt's "TheSecret History" and as technically dazzling as Jonathan Franzen's "TheCorrections."
Houston Chronicle Barbara Liss
This is no jokey, print version of the television series The Office. No less than his hero DeLillo, Ferris understands what it means to be disaffected in America. Now he may come to understand how it feels to be a major American novelist.
The Independent Ed Caesar
What will resonate longest from Then We Came to the End is its acuteness of vision. Ferris captures the febrile office-creeping and corridor-whispering that accompanies redundancies so adroitly you can almost smell the squared carpet.
The Guardian Carrie O'Grady
It's hard to work out, in the end, whether Ferris's novel is funny or sad. It's certainly absurd, and very entertaining.
The New Yorker
Although the novel is somewhat baggy, the narration...never falters, making this a masterwork of pitch and tone, in which individual characters are less important than the general mood of boredom leavened with camaraderie.
New York Observer Emily Bobrow
Ferris' observations are often ticklish, making the book feel like the one we have rattling in our heads. But the slippery monotony of the tone…deprives it of any sort of narrative build.
San Francisco Chronicle Reagan Upshaw
As with a well-written TV sitcom, you come to care about the characters...though the characterizations don't go much deeper than a sitcom.
The New York Times Book Review James Poniewozik
Then We Came to the End, it turns out, is neither small nor angry, but expansive, great-hearted and acidly funny.
Wall Street Journal Joshua Ferris
We're happy to read about this pathetic and noble workforce from the "inside," all the way to the end.
Boston Globe John Freeman
Ferris wisely knows there is only so much ha-ha and hee-hee to squeeze for amusing cruelty, so, as the bodies begin to pile up and the lay off ax chops faster, the humor is increasingly mediated by moments of touching solidarity.
Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
Ferris' writing displays a strong descriptive flair, but the greatest asset of Then We Came to the End is the nuance of its narrative voice, which has the gossipy warmth and seeming closeness of a conspiratorial co-worker leaning over a partition to impart the latest rumor.
Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
If Ferris were just being clever and snarky, Then We Came to the End would buckle in on itself long before the warm-hearted epilogue. But even his most gonzo creation is given a sympathetic aspect that saves him from caricature.
Entertainment Weekly Tina Jordan
While amusing, [the] juvenile sensibility wears thin at 387 pages.
The Spectator Eric Weinberger
The endless chitchat will dry at least some of us out.
 The average user rating for this book is 7.4 (out of 10) based on 15 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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