The Unnamed

The new novel from Then We Came to an End writer Joshua Ferris is an exhausting powerhouse of a novel. After you finish it, you will need a stiff walk.

Like Then We Came To An End, if you buy the premise: the man who has everything will without warning or catalyst walk till he collapses from exhaustion, you’re in for a treat. This book isn’t about what his affliction is, or the triumph over adversity that permeates trying to cure it. It’s about the minute ways it affects a family of three. Told in lumps around each occurrence of the affliction, spanning decades in walking Tim’s life, we learn about his perfect family: wife who drinks too much and loves too much, spoilt misunderstood daughter, his perfect job: jealous partners, anxious clients, legal manoeuvres, and about his compulsion to walk, how it manifests and what it does to him. We watch as the family crumbles, as they pin their hopes on air, as they fight off the accusations that this is all in his head and when we get to the extended passage at the end, juxtaposing Tim’s latest seemingly endless walk and its fallout back home, we’re near to collapse, suffering Tim’s exhaustion.

It’s a neat trick. Ferris relies on the effects of the affliction and not the science behind it so that the affliction becomes a metaphor for complacency, for marriage, for professionalism, for having it all and squandering it, making this a tense and emotional literal journey of one man against the elements. Like Then We Came to An End, this is book worthy of our attention, for the simple fact that Ferris unlike many others, is a master of wringing new ways of telling stories out of the cogs.