Book review: The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

BOOK
The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris
Viking, £12.99
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Author's follow-up to an impressive debut offers an ambling narrative.

REVIEW
Joshua Ferris came to public attention with his redundancy-era office story Then We Came To The End.

His award-winning debut heralded a droll modern voice - easy going, perceptive and relevant. His second novel requires all those skills to cajole the reader to the end of a story that is so essentially sad that its rewards are hard-won and rare.

Ferris' sinuous style, his rich descriptions and his telling examination of the human condition are spoonfuls of sugar to make the medicine go down.

Not that there is any conventional treatment for New York lawyer Tim Farnsworth. He walks. He can't stop himself. He might swoop down to collect a backpack of survival gear - for when he stops, he sleeps - but there's no halting his "benign idiopathic perambulation".

No-one knows why he walks and Ferris takes us from the accommodation of an embarrassing ailment in the office environment, through the travails of a family imploding in the face of a predicament to a fully-fledge rail-at-the-gods psychological breakdown.

Like Tim himself, the novel drifts and avoids all attempts at structure (a subplot about a murder is the closest thing to conventional storytelling, but goes nowhere) but there's no doubting Ferris' confidence and rigour in his handling of such a singular and abstract subject.

– March 8, 2010