Then We Came To The End, by Joshua Ferris

A little way into Joshua Ferris's virtuoso debut novel about life at a Chicago advertising agency, it emerges that a professorial-looking black copywriter named Hank Neary is writing a novel. Neary's work in progress is, he says, "a small, angry book about work". Great, his colleagues think: "there was a fun read on the beach."

Ferris's insertion of the novelist is a neat post-modern trick and a witty deprecation of his own talent, but he need not have been so bashful. Then We Came to the End is so much more than small and angry. In his detailing of the daily water cooler gossip and Darwinian jockeying that accompanies life under fluorescent strip lights, Ferris nails his quarry with wit and some compassion.

The narrative unfolds in the first person plural: a "we" that suggests common fears and intrigues. This "we" is in some disarray. In Chicago after the dotcom bust, at a struggling agency, redundancies are in the air. The office is alive with one question - who will be next to go?

As a succession of staff are fired - or, in the Tom Waits-inspired office vernacular, "walk Spanish down the hall" - we discover more about their lives. Some seek medication, others return with a vengeance, still more walk quietly to the escalator. Their workplace resonates with a gallows humour that makes one wince with familiarity, in the same way one might at The Office.

As if things were not bad enough at the agency, the redoubtable female boss delivers the impossible brief: an advertisement to make breast cancer sufferers laugh. There are blank faces and blank minds, but with the prospect of being the next one to "walk Spanish", no one can appear to be anything other than busy.

The last we see, directly, of the agency is in the early days of September 2001. Ferris never uses the dates to guide us to any conclusion (his writing is far too accomplished) but his sense of history is provocative. It is impossible, as one reaches the end, not to see the agency in a prelapsarian glow.

What will resonate longest from Then We Came to the End is its acuteness of vision. Ferris captures the febrile office-creeping and corridor-whispering that accompanies redundancies so adroitly you can almost smell the squared carpet. When one laughs - and one has frequent cause to - it is with the sting: we know about that.

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