Joshua Ferris' 'The Unnamed' goes nowhere fast

Joshua Ferris' 'The Unnamed' goes nowhere fast

By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY

Funny, compassionate, moving: All those words apply to Joshua Ferris' marvelous 2007 debut novel, Then We Came to the End. HBO has purchased the rights to Ferris' story of a Chicago ad agency coming apart after the dot-com bubble bursts.

It's unfair to expect an author to rewrite an earlier work or retain the same winning voice. But Ferris' new novel, The Unnamed, resembles less a sophomore slump than a cliff dive. It may brim with artistic courage and ambition, but almost nothing about this humorless book works.

The protagonist is a successful Manhattan lawyer named Tim Farnsworth whose career, family and, ultimately, life are destroyed by a mysterious ailment with no name: He has periods in which a compulsion to walk overtakes him. Frostbitten toes fall off, important clients — including one facing a murder charge — are ignored, his unhappy teenage daughter sits alone, but Farnsworth literally cannot stop walking.

Weather, the hour, location — strip mall, inner-city dumpster, suburban subdivision — nothing stops him, until he eventually falls into a deep sleep. Then, upon awakening, he calls his patient wife, Jane, to pick him up.

There are several problems with this story: Ferris never makes clear what Farnsworth's walking compulsion symbolizes. Is it an addiction, a medical mystery, rugged individualism run amok or simply the existential loneliness of the human condition? By the end, it comes across as simply a plot contrivance.

None of the characters — least of all Farnsworth — engage the reader, with the exception of Farnsworth's loving wife. A real estate agent who copes with her husband's illness with drinking bouts at Bennigan's, she can't keep her husband manacled to the wall of their bedroom, nor can she accept his desire to kill himself.

Jane's dilemma feels authentic and universal: How do you keep taking care of a loved one who has a condition — a drug addiction, a chronic illness — that is destroying your life?

Unfortunately, Farnsworth and his far-fetched "condition" form the heart of the novel, dooming it. Believing neither in his malady nor his role as a tragic figure, the reader ends up wishing Jane would handcuff Mr. Crazy Legs so the rest of us could get out of the house.

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