Then We Came to the End

This book, by Joshua Ferris, is brilliant hilarious. Sort of a cross between Geoffrey O’Brien and Don DeLillo, only funnier. Or like a fast-forward Richard Ford without the smugness. It’s impressive to me the way in which novel-writing technique has improved in recent decades. I mean, John Updike was pretty slick, but Ferris (and, for that matter, Ford) really seems in total control of his material, even in comparison to the masters of the previous generations. Sure, there was Nabokov (and, in his own way, James Jones), but that’s about it from back then. Now there seem to be a lot of novelists who really know what they’re doing in this way. (I think Jonathan Coe could have total control of his material too, if he really felt like it. He seems like Mailer or (Martin) Amis in his desire to shatter his own smooth surfaces.)

P.S. Sorry for only mentioning white males. I’ll try to do better next time. Veronica Geng? Alex Haley? Joy Luck Club?

P.P.S. I recommended “Then We Came to the End” to a friend the other day. She hadn’t read it, and I’m not sure if she knew what it was about, but, oddly enough, she knew the author’s name. I’m not likely to remember an author’s name if I haven’t read the book (especially since it was his first). She did, however, return the favor by recommending I read something by Jane Austen. I don’t think I’ve read any pre-Dickens novels, and she teaches a whole classful of this stuff. Mark Twain is the earliest writer who reads to me as if it could be written today, but she said that Austen is like that too.

6 thoughts on “Then We Came to the End

  1. Something about the way that everything comes so easily to Frank Bascombe; he just seems so superior to those around him. Yes, you could say that's just a characterization, but to me it seems to reveal a certain smugness, a sense that Ford himself sees the world that way. Just my impression. I think Ford is great, this just rubs me the wrong way a bit.

  2. John's comment is funny in a way, because Bascombe is nothing if not smug. But, Andrew: just because Bascombe is smug doesn't mean Ford is smug. Andrew's post is particularly timely for me, since I just read The Lay of the Land last week. At some point I found myself irritated at Bascombe's wiser-than-thou attitude, but then it occurred to me that this is Bascombe's attitude, not Ford's. Ford presumably does it on purpose…in fact, he must. So I don't know if Ford is smug. I know Bascombe is.

    By the way, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Someone told me that there is a South Park episode about all of the Priuses in this area generating "cloud of smug" that threatens the whole country. Funny.

  3. Phil,

    Yes, the episode is Smug Alert! — 10th season and worth watching.

    I haven't read Lay of the Land but have read the other two Bascombe books, and I don't recall passages from them that make Bascombe seem smug (save maybe one at the end of The Sportswriter). Can you point me to some passages?

    Bascombe is plainly satisfied with some parts of his life — the second book is a paean to New Jersey and the virtues of being a real–estate agent –– but this alone shouldn't lead us to call him smug any more than we think Andrew smug for singing the praises of the statistician's career in general and Columbia's departments in particular. Reveling in some things about one's life isn't enough to make one smug, is it?

  4. There is some sort of paradox of revealed smugness. For example, Feynman in his books comes off as a real jerk, but people who actually knew him all seemed to like the guy. Perhaps Bascombe, too, has redeeming qualities.

    P.S. to John: In real life, I'm not smug at all–that's just my blog personality; see discussion here: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/ar

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