This meandering tale of a group of co-workers who spend more time gossiping about one another than they do working, even in the face of an economic downturn, makes up in sheer style what it might lack in plot.
Ferris has assembled a cast of characters with the same kind of goofiness that pervaded âThe Officeâ and occasionally even rings with the same tone of âM*A*S*Hâ or "Catch-22", but without the blood. Even as the reader may be allowed a bit of impatience at the juvenile hijinks of the workplace, anyone who has ever worked in an office will recognize the petty frustrations and the ego-driven conflicts. A continuing thread dealing with the poaching of office equipment from recently-vacated cubicles is probably the funniest motif in the book; many of the other situations actually depend on an essential sadness that pervades cubicle-land.
Most of the book is written from an unusual first-person plural viewpoint: âWhen someone quit, we couldn't believe it.â âWe wanted to die looking stupid in front of Lynn, but we didn't mind it in front of Joe.â The single exception is a third-person chapter in the midst of all this middle-school nattering in which a character faces the prospect of a looming surgery that is terrifying to her.
âThe Thing to Do and the Place to Beâ could easily be a stand-alone short story, and one could entertain the notion that the rest of the novel actually sprang up to accompany it. Powerful and frightening, it's something that will stick with the reader for a long time, particularly if they have ever found themselves at a similar crossroads.
Ferris wraps all this up with a bittersweet coda set at a time when the team has gone their separate ways. Some questions are answered â a few with borderline unbelievable resolutions -- while others are allowed to play out unresolved.
Kind of like life, actually.
Ferris has assembled a cast of characters with the same kind of goofiness that pervaded âThe Officeâ and occasionally even rings with the same tone of âM*A*S*Hâ or "Catch-22", but without the blood. Even as the reader may be allowed a bit of impatience at the juvenile hijinks of the workplace, anyone who has ever worked in an office will recognize the petty frustrations and the ego-driven conflicts. A continuing thread dealing with the poaching of office equipment from recently-vacated cubicles is probably the funniest motif in the book; many of the other situations actually depend on an essential sadness that pervades cubicle-land.
Most of the book is written from an unusual first-person plural viewpoint: âWhen someone quit, we couldn't believe it.â âWe wanted to die looking stupid in front of Lynn, but we didn't mind it in front of Joe.â The single exception is a third-person chapter in the midst of all this middle-school nattering in which a character faces the prospect of a looming surgery that is terrifying to her.
âThe Thing to Do and the Place to Beâ could easily be a stand-alone short story, and one could entertain the notion that the rest of the novel actually sprang up to accompany it. Powerful and frightening, it's something that will stick with the reader for a long time, particularly if they have ever found themselves at a similar crossroads.
Ferris wraps all this up with a bittersweet coda set at a time when the team has gone their separate ways. Some questions are answered â a few with borderline unbelievable resolutions -- while others are allowed to play out unresolved.
Kind of like life, actually.
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