The Richard and Judy book club is a phenomenon we ignore at our peril. Let's not kid ourselves that R&J fever is confined to the coffee-and-couch stay-at-home brigade. When Tom Chivers introduced Joshua Ferris reading from Then We Came To The End at the London Word Festival and added that the book had been selected for the Richard and Judy book club, the crowd whooped. And I whooped with them.
Ferris' tale of office life in Chicago is a fascinating choice for the 2008 book club lineup. Not because it wins hand over fist in terms of originality or excellence. The R&J list is a cut above Barbara Taylor Bradford sagas and is pretty strong as it goes on originality and excellence. But Ferris has done something exceptional in literature - he intrigues us not by the exotic or the extraordinary but by putting his finger on the mundane and everyday. There is some literature you read and think "that's clever", "that's beautiful" or "that's powerful". When I read Ferris' debut novel I thought "that's right". Ferris has got under the skin of the 21st-century office and the way we work now. Work is a vital part of our lives: it shapes who we are and what we do in the world. This is what the R&J book club is driving at when it declares "It's the story of your life and mine".
Work sure ain't what it used to be - and I for one am thankful that I'm not pulling beet in a field as my mother once did. My working life has been largely office based, give or take a few loo-cleaning summer jobs and one stint at a 'bone making' factory in Stoke Newington (yes, really).
Yet - and here's the thing - despite the relative civility and comfort of office work, the office has become a bugbear of modern life, where we live out what Ferris calls "cornered lives". Getting to grips with this reality could have produced a book strung out between cynicism and slapstick, a sort of David Brent does Bonfire of the Vanities. But Ferris has captured the zeitgeist too successfully and has taken too many cues from past masters for that.
When Ferris was asked at the London Word Festival which literature got it right about the modern workplace, two books came up: Joseph Heller's Something Happened and Don DeLillo's Americana, the first line of which - "Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year" - is the obvious inspiration for Ferris' own novel. Both published in the early 1970s, these books encapsulate the malaise and the allure of the modern office. Strikingly both DeLillo and Heller pick up on the strange home-from-home alienation that the office proffers: DeLillo describes the emotional ballast of office life where "There was a certain kind of love between you then, like the love in a family ... you could not walk among those desks for two thousand mornings, not hear those volleying typewriters, without coming to believe you were safe... the office surrendered a sense of belonging"; Heller's Bob Slocum simply states "It was not always clear in my mind which was my home and which my office: often I felt more at home at the office". What Heller and DeLillo started in the 1970s, Ferris brings up to date for today.
Ferris gives us more than a surface description of water-cooler culture, lunchtime gossip and bitching in meetings. His first-person-plural narrator makes us at home in the Chicago agency office, selling us the brand "we" that dominates the story. "We-we-ing" throughout a narrative could be a gimmick and an irritating one at that. But Ferris knows what he is about. Almost from the first sentence that all-encompassing, conspiratorial "we" constantly undermines and fragments itself: "Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never die because we would never die. Lynn Mason was dying". Collective confidence slips into snooping fatalism. The novel's characters are workers in search of a purpose and as their jobs become more meaningless, ephemeral and fragile, the more neurotic the collective voice becomes. "We" probes personal secrets and individual peccadilloes, demanding to know everything: "We did not like not knowing something. We could not abide being left in the dark". Then We Came To The End shows better than almost any novel I can think of the sense of pointlessness that pervades office life today, the emptiness that lingers when we find no common purpose in the work we do together.
That's true enough. But it's not the last word. Individuals in Then We Came To The End are funny, likeable and ultimately sympathetic, even the clown who goes postal with a paintball gun. And although the way we work has undoubtedly changed, the collective has - and still can - inspire us in both politics and poetry:
Hundreds to the inch the threads lie in, Like the men in a communist cell. There's a play o' licht frae the factory windas. Could you no' mak' mair yoursel'? Mony a loom mair alive than the weaver seems For the sun's still nearer than Rilke's dreams. (from Hugh MacDiarmid's The Seamless Garment)
