Am I Nuts?

The Old Man did not find the answer to the title question in the novel I want to review here. Nor did the character in the book, whose story it is. I will not call him the hero or the protagonist because basically I do not find him a sympathetic individual. Furthermore I find many of the people in the society depicted by the story equally unsympathetic and that is sad as it is very really the society in which we North Americans are living today.

The book is The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris, published in January 2010 by Little, Brown and Company of New York. The copyright particulars list the book under 5 fiction categories including lawyers and psychology. The author is a young appearing man who, in his jacket publicity photo, looks something like one of those boyish computer nerds who became overnight millionaires in the 1990s.

He seems too young to have the experience or depth of understanding I found in his writing but in an interview about his first novel found on his personal website some explanation can be found. He cites his youth in the Florida Keys, college in Iowa, a stint working for an advertising agency (a subject of his first novel), a MFA degree in California during which he started that first novel, scrapped it, thought about it for some three years and finished it in fourteen weeks. It won numerous awards.

Many of the book reviews for this second novel call it a comedy, acidly funny, and Stephen King found it “Hilarious in a Catch 22 way, but with an undercurrent of sadness that works counterpoint to all the absurdity.” Personally I found nothing really funny about the story except perhaps in the way that satire can sometimes by funny. We can certainly laugh at some of the ridiculous things that happen in the character’s love story, in the story of his absurd compulsion to walk till he falls asleep, and in his lawyer’s story.

The story begins with the short sentence, “It was the cruelest winter.” It then plunges the reader into the first episode of compulsive walking that forces him to leave his office. It is the physical or mental condition that dominates the story. In this case he left his law office only lightly dressed and continued until he finally managed to get into a cab to take him home before falling asleep on the back seat. There we meet these main characters as Tim Farnsworth and his wife, Jane, as well as their only daughter, Becka, in what becomes a strange but touching love story.
Money appears to be no problem for this family and even when he is found sleeping in an alley or in a park flower bed, he always seems to have enough cash and access to his investments when he needs to prove his independence. Threading through the whole is Tim’s high intelligence and his twenty years as a successful attorney, making partner in one of New York’s largest and most prestigious law firms. He brings in millions of dollars in fees every year. His attempts to keep his affliction from his partners could be considered one of the comedic aspects of the story.

I found Tim’s mental process during the progress of the condition (one of the many doctors he had consulted had dubbed it benign idiopathic perambulation) quite fascinating and my need to continue from one page to the next of this novel almost as compelling as Tim’s inability to stop walking and hypnotic in its effect.

Being somewhat inclined to rely on chronological and geographical markers in my thoughts and scribbling, I was somewhat challenged to follow times and places as the tale proceeds, with somewhat sudden flashbacks appearing from time to time and never being completely sure where Tim is in his current walking exercise or how long the story takes to the end, in terms of Tim’s life. I was never sure whether the things and people he saw or talked about were real or part of his hallucinations.

It all ends sadly of course. Still, as you read you will find meaningful discussions about the American Dream and its consequences, about nature itself and our place in it, about the nature of God, about the existence of body and soul as separate entities and about the amazing abuse the body can take before it destroys itself.

Tim’s walking compulsion ends in a tent, during his last sleep, in a bedroll in an unnamed northern American mountain pass in the midst of a roaring blizzard, and I found the ending recounted on the last page strangely comforting:

He thought he might open his eyes to see if the silhouette of the falling snow continued to dapple the skin of the tent, but he decided not to exert himself unnecessarily. Instead he chose to do as he had done the night before: settle deep inside himself and listen to the strange, subtle operations going on inside his body. He listened for his heart to whisper its soft word. He listened for the breathing that lifted him up and down inside the bag. But listen … listen … listen was gone. His quiescent nerves gave no signals and received none. He detected nothing but an enormous, gentle stillness from the things he could name and those he couldn’t inside him, the organs and muscles, the cells and tissues. He never had to rise again, the silence informed him. never had to walk, never had to seek out food, never had to carry around the heavy and the weary weight, and in a measure of time that may have been the smallest natural unit known to man, or that may have been and may still remain all of eternity, he realized that he was still thinking, his mind was still afire, that he had just scored if not won the whole damn thing, and that the exquisite thought of his eternal rest was how delicious that cup of water was going to taste the instant it touched his lips.

If you are not easily put off by a modicum of sex and the occasional f… word and are otherwise intrigued, I think you should give the book a try.

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