Joshua Ferris

Long March By JAY McINERNEY

THE UNNAMED

By Joshua Ferris

313 pp. A Reagan Arthur Book/Little, Brown & Company.

The ad agency employees who form the collective narrative voice of Joshua Ferris’s masterly debut, Then We Came to the End,” are on intimate terms with the concept of branding. As branders, they undoubtedly would have advised their creator, in planning his second novel, to hew closely to the recipe that made his first novel such a critical and popular success, that made it read sort of like a highbrow novelization of “The Office.” With his second novel Ferris makes it clear that he has absolutely no intention, for the moment at least, of repeating himself or creating an authorial brand. In fact, it’s difficult to believe that “The Unnamed” and “Then We Came to the End” come from the same laptop.

“The Unnamed” provides brief glimpses of office life — in this case at a high-voltage Midtown Manhattan law firm. Tim Farnsworth is a successful trial attorney, the kind of compulsive overachiever who takes pride in his 14-hour workdays, his knowledge of the law and the power of his rational faculties. He’s still devoted to his wife, Jane, when he sees her, though his absence seems to have taken a toll on Becka, his teenage daughter, who is chronically overweight and socially maladroit.

Tim’s obsessive devotion to his work is ultimately overridden by a more powerful compulsion. Tim Farnsworth literally walks out of his office one cold winter day, the victim of an uncontrollable locomotive impulse. It has happened before. He can’t stop walking. Really. Sometimes for miles and miles, until the compulsion is finally spent, at which point he usually lies down wherever he finds himself and falls into a deep and dreamless sleep.

The novel opens with the onset of the third recurrence of this disorder, which no doctor or psychiatrist has been able to diagnose. Tim has been to Switzerland, Cleveland and Rochester, Minn. — all the medical meccas, without learning anything useful about his condition, which appears to be sui generis and unnamed. “The health professionals suggested clinical delusion, hallucinations, even multiple personality disorder.” As a lawyer Tim believes in precedent, but there is no precedent. He believes his mind is intact, yet there is no evidence of any physical cause. His wife thinks of the problem as “a hijacking of some obscure order of the body, the frightened soul inside the runaway train of mindless matter, peering out from the conductor’s car in horror.”

When Tim suffers a recurrence of the unnamed affliction, he is working on a murder case, defending a major client against charges that he killed his wife. In his pride and stubbornness he clings to the case, despite the fact that he finds himself propelled out of the office and into the street at random intervals. He invents a cover story, claiming that Jane is battling cancer, to cover his frequent disappearances. He develops frostbite; he loses a little toe, then some of his fingers. And while he is on one of his power walks, he is accosted by a man who seems to know all the details of the murder, and who shows him a bloody knife that he claims is the murder weapon. In the grip of his compulsion Tim is unable to stop and confront the man. When he later describes the encounter to the police, they are understandably skeptical. The client is convicted after Tim is forced to pass the case to a colleague.

When the unnamed compulsion finally runs its course after a period of months, Tim is accepted back into the firm in a limited capacity. After months of worry and caretaking, his wife slips into compulsive drinking mode and ultimately goes to rehab. Tim on the other hand, starts to appreciate the small things in life, the little details like the sight of tugboats on the river that he’s ignored for years. He walks the city streets in a newly observant mode, at one point joining a line, which turns out to be a casting call, and listens to the conversations. “So this was the subculture, so often talked about but so often scattered, invisible as bedbugs, of the struggling actor. With the rest of the artists, together with the immigrants, they carried the city on their backs.” Ferris’s description of the actors, and the dialogue he creates for them, reminds us of what a brilliant and funny observer he can be.

Sadly, Tim’s remission, and the novel’s flirtation with the textures and tones of daily communal life, is short-lived. It’s as if Ferris turns his back on his own abundant gifts as a novelist of manners, his gift for dialogue and for close observation of the linguistic and visual codes of American tribes, and starts walking so fast that he can hardly take in the landscape, let alone the people. “The Unnamed” is a road novel with severe tunnel vision.

The grim march with which the novel began recommences; this time Tim personifies his affliction, imagining it as a malevolent alter ego, an “other,” with whom he engages in furious arguments. He tries to starve himself, imagining that it is the other who is his corporeal and appetitive self. Whether or not Tim’s compulsion began with some sort of psychosis, his dialogue with the other makes him sound like a classic schizophrenic — or like Samuel Beckett in “The Unnamable,” a book that would seem to have been on Ferris’s mind. Tim stops calling Jane to pick him up, surrendering his grip on domesticity, and adapts to the walking life, crisscrossing the country, sleeping beside the highway, finding shelter where he can, dragging the reader behind him.

What does it mean? Tim’s affliction might be a metaphor for addiction, for careerism, for any compulsion that drives a man or woman to leave family and community and health behind. A preacher tells Tim near the end of his travels that not everything can be explained by reason — which seems like a mundane lesson for such a grueling course of study.

Perhaps we should be grateful that this isn’t another narrative of addiction, with all the tawdry scenes of gutter plumbing, sexual misconduct and the destruction of property. Although come to think of it, squalor and degradation can be, well, vivid. Ferris’s descriptions of Tim’s misadventures on the road are blurry and generalized. “The path itself was one of peaks and valleys, hot and cold in equal measure, rock, sedge and rush, the coil of barbed wire around a fence post, the wind boom of passing semis, the scantness and the drift.” This is not bad writing, but it’s not good storytelling.

Tim’s travels don’t really take him anywhere, literally or figuratively, until finally he makes a concerted effort to return to New York, fighting to make headway against the random dictates of his compulsion. Even as he ignores the landscape Ferris scrupulously documents the deterioration of Tim’s body and his mind as he struggles to return to Jane, who is dying of cancer. When he visits her in the hospital in between walks, she is astonished to find how little he notices on his travels. He finally starts to observe the world around him so that he can share the details with her, but for this reader, it’s too little, way too late.

Remember when Paul McCartney went classical with “Liverpool Oratorio”? Me neither. As a fan of “Then We Came to the End” I can admire Ferris’s earnest attempt to reinvent himself, but I can’t wait for him to return to the kind of thing at which he excels.

Jay McInerney’s latest book is “How It Ended: Collected Stories.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/books/review/McInerney-t.html