The Unnamed

Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2010 : It's back. With those words Tim and Jane Farnsworth reenter a nightmare they know so intimately it needs no other description. "It" may not be found among an insurance company's diagnostic codes, but the Farnsworths, a couple made wealthy by Tim's single-mindedly successful legal practice, know it too well: Tim's compulsion, at any random moment of the day or night, to set out walking for hours at a time until he collapses in exhaustion. They've survived two bouts of this inexplicable illness, which began as mysteriously as they ended, and now, as Joshua Ferris's second novel, The Unnamed , opens, they are beset by a third. Ferris's first book, Then We Came to the End , was one of the freshest, most acclaimed fiction debuts of the decade, but he's followed it not with an imitation or extension but with something thrillingly different. Like Tim possessed in one of his perambulatory vectors, Ferris follows his character's condition as far as it leads him, far beyond where logic and loyalty usually take our lives, but always treats it with empathy, grace, and imagination. His language is as exact and poetic as his premise is fantastic, and by the story's end you feel the title refers not only to his hero's strange and solitary disease but also to those elemental but equally inexplicable forces that bind us together through the most difficult turns of our fated lives. --Tom Nissley From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. In Ferris's remarkable second novel (after Then We Came to the End ), a life of privilege comes to ruin as a result of a strange and mysterious illness. Attorney Tim Farnsworth thought he had recovered from a disorder that compels him to walk to the point of exhaustion. But now his walking disease has returned and shows no sign of going into remission. His wife, Jane, supportive beyond measure, does everything she can to keep Tim safe during his walks, including making routine midnight trips to pick him up. As the disorder takes increasing control over their lives, however, the sacrifices they make for each other drive them further apart. Ferris manages to inject a bizarre whimsy into a devastatingly sad story, with each of Tim's outings revealing a new aspect of his marriage. The novel's circular aspects, with would-be happy endings spiraling back into chaos and then descending further, integrate Ferris's themes of family, sickness, and the uncertain division between body and mind into a vastly satisfying and original book. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* In a radical departure from his satiric workplace comedy, Then We Came to the End (2007), Ferris turns in a dark and utterly compelling second novel on the insanity of modern life. Tim Farnsworth is a very successful trial attorney who suffers from a mysterious illness. With no warning, he is overcome by the physical compulsion to walk and walk to the point of physical exhaustion. So far, he has recovered twice. But with the third recurrence, the illness threatens to take his family under. Over the years, his wife, Jane, has rescued him countless times, in the middle of the night, in the freezing cold, from suburban communities and city parks. Now both Jane and their daughter, Becka, struggle with deep sadness and the loss of hope as Tim returns home less and less often. Ferris imbues his story with a sense of foreboding, both for the physical world, in the grip of record-breaking temperatures, and for the vulnerable nuclear family and its slow unraveling. With his devastating metaphoric take on the yearning for connection and the struggles of commitment, Ferris brilliantly channels the suburban angst of Yates and Cheever for the new millennium. --Joanne Wilkinson "Arresting, ground-shifting, beautiful and tragic. This is the book a new generation of writers will answer to. No one in America writes like this." ( Gary Shteyngart, author of ABSURDISTAN and THE RUSSIAN DEBUTANTE'S HANDBOOK )"Audacious, risky and powerfully bleak, with the author's unflinching artistry its saving grace." ( Kirkus Reviews )"Ferris imbues his story with a sense of foreboding, both for the physical world, in the grip of record-breaking temperatures, and for the vulnerable nuclear family and its slow unraveling. With its devastating metaphoric take on the yearning for connection and the struggles of commitment, Ferris brilliantly channels the suburban angst of Yates and Cheever for the new millennium." ( Booklist, starred review )"Rich and profound." ( Time )"Unfold[s] in a hushed, shadowed dimension located somewhere between myth and a David Mamet play." ( Salon )"An unnerving portrait of a man stripped of civilization's defenses. Ferris's prose is brash, extravagant, and, near the end, chillingly beautiful." ( The New Yorker )"Astonishing and compelling." ( Very Short List )"Ferris puts his notable wit and observational ability aside in favor of a far more psychological (and ultimately physical) examination of the self. . . . an accomplished and daring work by a writer just now realizing what he is capable of creating." ( The Los Angeles Times )"[Ferris is] a brilliant and funny observer." ( The New York Times )"Ferris shows a talent for the grotesque in his riveting descriptions of Tim's decline. He also includes his specialty - scenes of juicy office intrigue. But what's most engrossing in his portrait of a couple locked in an extreme version of a familiar conflict - the desire to stay together versus an inexplicable yearning to walk away." ( O Magazine )"You can't break away from the grip of these opening chapters . . . Ferris usually writes in a steady, cool voice whether delivering the quotidian details of office work or existential observations about God that would otherwise sound grandiose. The effect is a terrifying portrayal of intermittent mental illness, the way the fear of relapse becomes a kind of specter, mocking each recovery and shredding any hope of a cure." ( The Washington Post )"Strange and beguiling . . . With this brave and masterful novel, Ferris has proven himself a writer of the first order. The Unnamed poses a question that could not be more relevant to the America of 2010: Will the compulsions of our bodies defeat the contents of our souls?" ( The Boston Globe )"Riveting." ( The Wall Street Journal )"Where Then We Came to the End mined the minutiae of cubicle life for humor and pathos, this one goes straight for the heart (and the jugular), telling the story of a married father struggling with an inexplicable disease, and the lengths to which he'll go to maintain control of his life." ( GQ )"At once riveting, horrifying and deeply sad, The Unnamed, like Tim's feet, moves with a propulsion all its own. This is fiction with the force of an avalanche, snowballing unstoppable until it finally comes to rest-when we come to the end, so to speak." ( The San Francisco Chronicle )"There is beauty in Ferris' writing, even when charged with despair." ( The Chicago Sun-Times )"Mr. Ferris is wise enough not to teach a lesson. Rather, he has teased ordinary circumstances into something extraordinary, which is exactly what we want our fiction writers to do." ( The Economist )" The Unnamed is ambitious, intelligent, and even more complex than Ferris's debut novel, Then We Came to the End ." ( Christian Science Monitor )"Bracingly original . . . Surprisingly, almost tenderly, and despite his unrelenting refusal to churn out a predictable happy ending, [Ferris] turns The Unnamed into a most unorthodox love story about commitment and sacrifice." ( The Miami Herald )"Ferris' distinctive writing style is serious but whimsical, philosophical with a touch of the absurd." ( St. Petersburg Times ) Joshua Ferris's first novel, Then We Came to the End , won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and was a National Book Award finalist. It has been translated into 24 languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker , Granta , Best New American Voices, New Stories from the South, Prairie Schooner , and The Iowa Review . He lives in New York. Read more