The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Date: January 2010

This book has been pretty hyped up since it came out earlier this year. I wanted to see what it was all about, and I’m glad I did.

Every once in a while I will get into a book that really drives me down into a dark place. This one had all the makings of being one of those books, being totally devoid of all the humor Ferris showed in Then We Came to the End. We are given a pretty ordinary family - financially successful father and mother who are in love. Teenage daughter who is distant and emotionally detatched from them. The story really revolves around the deconstruction of Tim, the father, and his family around him.

How can we have our lives fall apart like that? Depression, disease, job loss, death, and on and on. Ferris leaves Tim’s affliction “Unnamed”, but seems to represent all of these things, where our will is irrelevant when larger things are working around us to drag us down.

Anyway…I read right through this book. Ferris has a wonderful ease to his writing which is simple, yet beautiful, making us turn the page with passages like this:

“They say it takes a long time to really get to know somebody. They say a good marriage requires work. They say it’s important to change alongside your partner to avoid growing apart. They talk about patience, sacrifice, compromise, tolerance. It seems the goal of these bearers of conventional wisdom is to get back to zero. They would have you underwater, tethered by chains to the bow of a ship full of treasure now sunk, struggling to free yourself to make it to the surface. With luck he will free himself, too, and then you can bob along together, scanning the horizon for some hint of land. They say boredom sets in, passion dissipates, idiosyncrasies start to grate, and the same problems repeat themselves. Why do you do it? Security, family, companionship. Ideally you do it for love. There’s something they don’t elaborate on. They just say the word and you’re supposed to know what it means, and after twenty years of marriage, you are held up as exemplars of that simple foundation, love, upon which (with sweeping arms) all this is built. But don’t let appearances fool you. That couple with twenty years still fights, they still go to bed angry, they still let days pass without –
The trouble with these cheap bromides, she thought, is that they don’t capture the half of it.”

So, basically, a fantastic read and one of my favorites of the year.