Compelled to Wander, Nowhere to Go by Janet Maslin

Books of The Times

THE UNNAMED

By Joshua Ferris

310 pages. Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown & Company.

Tim Farnsworth, the unaccountably restless main character in Joshua Ferris’s second novel (after his charming but weightless “Then We Came to the End”), can’t stop walking. Nobody knows why, and “The Unnamed” takes its title from Tim’s peculiar condition. Is it medical? Is it spiritual? Or is it metaphorical in ways that suggest Mr. Ferris’s readers had better beware?

This much is clear about Tim’s condition: It is conducive to authorial overkill. So as Mr. Ferris writes about Tim, somehow conveying Tim’s self-pity through his third person narrative voice, he gives “The Unnamed” a writerly preciousness that is as tangible as Tim’s problem is vague. This novel opens with a section called “The Feet, Mechanical” which is suggestive of “The Syntax, Adorable,” and introduces a cold winter through which Tim will begin to wander. “The cold was mother of invention, a vengeful mother whose lessons were delivered at the end of a lash,” Mr. Ferris writes prettily, too prettily, on this novel’s opening page.

Tim can’t help venturing out into that cold on foot. Leaving behind his prestigious job at a law firm, his suburban house, his wife of 20 years and a daughter who wears dreadlocks (“They moved around her head the way mitter curtains dance lazily over the car at an automatic car wash, heavy and grayish”), Tim becomes a hobo, albeit the kind of hobo whose wife packs his trail mix, base layer of thermal long underwear and GPS. He leaves home and walks until he collapses, experiencing bouts of what the security guard at his law firm calls “the walking thing” and one baffled doctor diagnoses as “benign idiopathic perambulation.”

Whatever this condition is, Mr. Ferris has hung a whole book on it, much as Joseph Heller coaxed “Something Happened” forth from an unnamed, free-floating malaise.

In Tim’s case, as “The Unnamed” begins, the condition has manifested itself twice before, so he and his family know the drill. His wife, Jane, does her best to keep him safe and warm and to find him each time he disappears. When following him doesn’t work, she tries handcuffing him to a bed or chaining him to a wall. Those tactics don’t work, either.

At the Helleresque law firm where Tim works and none of his colleagues like or trust one another, the mood is sufficiently flippant and ironic (“Knock knock” “Hey hey”) to accommodate much kinkier personal problems than Tim’s. But he scares the other lawyers, particularly when he comes to work wearing a custom-made brain helmet over his newly shaved head. He becomes a pariah. He winds up cut loose from both his domestic and professional lives.

Tim feels as if he’s gotten off several gerbil wheels: the wheels of work, of medical treatment and of suburban family life. But “The Unnamed” is a literal Ferris wheel for the reader, since it brings Tim through ups and downs so cyclical they make the book seem to be going nowhere. Will Jane stay loyal to Tim? What if she develops her own problems? Will his body stay intact, or will his fingers and toes start falling off? (They do, and one toe becomes “mummified” to the point where it looks “like a giant raisin.”) Will he keep winding up in one quirky setting after the next? “I can’t keep waking up in potato chip trucks,” he tells Jane after finding himself in one painted with the Utz logo. “No,” Jane says, “I guess you can’t.” If only she were right.

Mr. Ferris gives himself little choice but to keep on making Tim’s situation sadder. So Tim begins hearing a strange voice in his head. (“Good shoes are not simply a luxury,” says the voice. “Funny looks from funny male strangers are unsettling. A change in bowel habits is cause for alarm.”) He becomes enough of a derelict and a danger to be treated as a mental patient and given antipsychotic drugs. Jane self-medicates at a Bennigan’s in Connecticut and races on her own gerbil wheel between that watering hole and a nearby motel until she invites eight of the bar’s patrons home because her house is big enough to have eight beds. Tim moves them into a one-bedroom city apartment in hopes that the change of setting will change their lives.

“You go on and on,” Mr. Ferris writes, trying to describe Tim’s weary feeling and certainly summarizing this novel’s. “Your one note gets repetitive, it’s taxing. The crying, the lowing, the constant me me me.”

By this point Tim is becoming ready to talk about the armies of God, to speak of the body and soul and to say that “the blood-brain barrier and the synapses are the two main fronts.” He is so far gone, with so little understanding of his condition, that he has passed the point of no return, and this novel will have no easy resolution. Since he seemed to be making an irrevocable break with his old life in the very first pages of “The Unnamed,” it’s hard to explain where 300-odd pages and all that time have gone.

Mr. Ferris surely means to write charmingly of a man and wife who call each other “banana” and who have been through endless shared battles with an unseen, undefinable threat. In fact he describes Tim, Jane and their daughter, Becka, with palpable affection. So it becomes that much more pitiful when he turns out to have given them no real way to withstand a biblical degree of suffering and sorrow. Yet he keeps their plight too lightweight and fanciful to invite real empathy. It’s too easy to shrug off what happens in “The Unnamed” without imagining that it could happen to you.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/books/14book.html