Life in a cubical farm: Josuha Ferris

COURTESY PHOTO Author Josuha Ferris in an office cubical. Let's face it, working in an office can be very strange.

You're given a desk, maybe a cubicle too, or, if you're lucky, an actual office. You have to stay tethered to your desk for eight to 10 hours a day, sometimes longer.

And working in an office can be a crash course in Advanced Group Dynamics.

You're thrown into close proximity with a group of strangers, each with his or her own set of quirks and foibles. Some are slackers, some are gossips, some are non-stop talkers. Some are fastidious, some totally disorganized. Some steal your ideas and plum assignments, while others do as little as possible.…and wind up being continually promoted.

And then there are the bosses. If you're lucky, you get one who's fair, even-tempered and knowledgeable. But the odds are more likely you'll have one who plays favorites, throws temper tantrums and is astoundingly inept. Nothing you do is ever good enough, no level of productivity is ever enough.

You receive mysterious pronouncements and memos from upper management or corporate headquarters. You puzzle over them. They bear no reality to your working life.

Then they lay off half the department (a process called buy-outs, or "restructuring"), and you're urged to "do more with less."

Novelist Joshua Ferris knows the routine well. He worked in a Chicago advertising agency for three years, writing ad copy for Sprint, Microsoft, Holiday Inn, Intercontinental Hotel and others. Observing the high drama that plays out in an office, he knew he wanted to write a novel based in that setting.

"[I was] going in every day to a place that, on the surface, seemed dull, not exactly what I wanted to do with my life," Ferris says. "But underneath, it had several rich veins running through it, of personal drama, of corporate intrigue, and of office politics. And it just struck me as very fertile material for a novel's attention."

Figuring out how he wanted to write it took longer than it took to actually write it, but after years of grappling, Ferris's novel, "Then We Came To the End," was published last year. A paperback version has just been released; Ferris will give a reading and sign books at 4 p.m. Saturday, March 29, at the Naples Barnes & Noble Booksellers. (His in-laws, incidentally, live in Naples.)

Ferris knew he wanted to write in the first person plural he says, but struggled for five years to get the right tone, the right voice.

"I knew I always wanted to tell the book from this unique point of view, namely, the office itself, the people who are employed in this office," he says. "I wanted to tell it from their point of view. But that seemed, in theory, and then eventually in practice, impossible to do. I simply didn't know how to do it. And so knowing that that was the only way I wanted to tell the story, but also at the same time, simply unable to do so, kept the book sort of in the realm of the theoretical for a long time. It wasn't until I got the first two sentences, the book's opening sentences, in my head, that I had kind of cracked the code.

"Those sentences are: 'We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise.' The code was the voice. Once I had a voice that expressed the human element of the cold corporate culture, I could use that tension to drive the engine.

"Whenever you have the word 'we' in a sentence, you always ask, 'Well, who's speaking?' But business and corporations never really tell you who it is. They speak in that voice all the time. They rarely tell you who the person is behind that voice. And so it's a very cold pronoun, because you don't have anything to hang your hat on. But if you can use that, if you can invest that pronoun with a genuine, human emotion and elements, then you have this weird dynamic, this dynamic between the human and the corporate. And that was what I needed to make it go."

Books are generally written in the first person singular or in the third person. (Though not the first book to do so, Jay McInerey's famous 1984 novel, "Bright Lights, Big City," was written in the second person and begins, "You are not the type of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.")

Ferris points out that "The Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugenides was written in the first person plural, and that the "New Yorker" "Talk of the Town" section used to be all written as "we." It was also a popular journalistic device, he says, adding that editorial boards still use it.

Ferris's use of the first person plural could seem like a gimmick or a writer's parlor trick, but he executes it well. And he nails the office milieu - the secret crushes, the rivalries, the gossip, the speculation, the bureaucracy, the pettiness, the boredom.

Ferris left his lucrative advertising job and went to the University of California Irvine to get a Master's in creative writing.

"If I was ever going to write a novel, I had to sacrifice and risk," he says. "Risk is really the word. I had to risk everything. Risk failure, risk financial struggle. Risk career. And so, just as equally as powerful as being singleminded is this great fear of the risks you're taking…I was a young, single guy, and I could afford to go into debt. I could afford to take a gamble. And it paid off."

"It paid off" is an understatement. "Then We Came to the End" became a bestseller and wound up on numerous "Best Books of 2007" lists, including those by the "Boston Globe," the "New York Times Book Review," "New York" magazine, "Time" magazine, Slate, Salon, the "St. Louis Post- Dispatch" and the "Christian Science Monitor." It was a National Book Award finalist. And HBO Films optioned the novel, though it hasn't been determined yet if it will play on cable or have a theatrical release.

Ferris is currently writing the screenplay while also working on his second novel, "The Unnamed." (He says it's about a man who suffers from a mysterious affliction, but refuses to reveal more.)

"There were some other companies that expressed interest, but HBO, I think, is a studio that expressed the greatest amount of excitement," he says. "And it's very, very difficult to get a movie made. And one intangible factor that seems to me to determine more than anything, except money, whether a movie gets made, is the degree of excitement that the people in charge have for a project. And their excitement was palpable. So it was an honor to sign up with them."

Writing fiction and screenplays are two totally different exercises, he says.

"For me, when writing fiction, voice is incredibly important," he explains. "The voice of the narrator is incredibly important. The voice that is the predominant experience of the book is fiction's greatest delight for me. In a screenplay, you just have dialogue, so the voice is the more pedestrian notion of voice. In other words, Voice with a capital V, is the great fuel of fiction. Screenplays have lots of little voices, little v's. And it's equally satisfying to give a little v voice an interesting voice, but it doesn't require you to have that overriding Big V Voice that tells a large story. It's just a patchwork of dialogue, a patchwork of people coming together and doing things. So they're just two very different approaches to telling a story.

"I can't write a poem to save my life. I make for a terrible journalist. I was a very half-hearted copywriter. But I do know my way around a script, and I feel confident writing fiction. Those two things, probably because of dialogue, fall into my plate, and I enjoy engaging with both of them."

Now that he works alone, Ferris recognizes the upside of office life and what he misses by no longer working in the ad agency.

"It definitely had moments of great levity and great humor," he says. "I probably didn't appreciate them as much at the time as I should have because I did want to write fiction, and I was very single-minded about that. So I probably failed to recognize, until I got out and started writing, just how much camaraderie and comedy had taken place while I was shimmying to get the hell out. In retrospect, compared to my solitary writer's day-in and day-out experience, it's a very lively, distracting, and at times enjoyable environment to be in."

But Ferris recognizes the writer's need to be alone. Writing fiction, he says, is "an act of imagination. It's a leap of faith, and then a remarkable dedication to craft. And those things require solitude, are nurtured by solitude, and ultimately can probably be only done in solitude. So it's not exactly as exciting as a big party, but I think it's a requisite, a very quiet requisite."

if you go

>> What: Joshua Ferris book signing

>> When: 4 p.m. Saturday, March 29

>> Where: Barnes & Noble Booksellers, Waterside Shops, 5377 Tamiami Trail, Naples

>> Cost: Free

>> Information: Call (239) 598-5200