But unlike the flu, we couldn’t afford to be left out if something was going around.” “If it started with one, soon it infected all. He’s wise to the protocol of meetings and “postmeeting meetings,” and he nails the dynamics of workplace rumor. Set in a Chicago-based ad agency reeling from the 2000-2001 dot-com crash, it’s a satire narrated by a corporate “we” who are having a hard time coping with impending job loss and the revelation that “employment, the daily nine-to-five, was driving us far from our better selves.”įerris, drawing on his own ad agency experience, neatly skewers the turf battles afflicting his characters, especially when it comes to claims on office furniture. To their ranks should be added Joshua Ferris, whose Then We Came to the End feels like a readymade classic of the genre. And Nicholson Baker pulled it off in zanily fastidious fashion in The Mezzanine. Joseph Heller did it in Something Happened (the one book of his to rival Catch-22). Not too many authors have written the Great American Office Novel.
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