Winter’s tale

Joshua Ferris’s second novel The Unnamed
is an arresting portrait of unravelling
American lives

by JULIET WATERS

I was worried when I first discovered Joshua Ferris’s second novel, The Unnamed, was being released in the middle of January. His first novel, Then We Came to the End, was a pretty solid commercial and critical success. But second novels from writers to watch don’t usually come out right after the Christmas buying season is over. This is usually the preferred time to publish first novels from writers we’ll never hear from again.

Like the sunny yellow Post-it notes on its cover, Ferris’s debut is stuck in my memory as an inventive and engaging social satire. But now that I think of it, one character was dying from cancer, and it was a book, after all, about a group of people being laid off from their jobs. But The Unnamed is substantially bleaker. Its opening paragraph offers no escape from the grey tedium of February.

“It was the cruellest winter. The winds were rabid off the rivers. Ice came down like poisoned darts. Four blizzards in January alone, and the snowbanks froze into grey barricades as grim and impenetrable as anything in war.”

The mood never gets much lighter than this. Even when the main character finds himself watching seven straight seasons of Buffy with his teenage daughter. But once I started getting more deeply into The Unnamed, I realized that this really is a book best read in the dead of winter. Anyone brave enough to read it now won’t soon forget its dark and penetrating problems.

Like Then We Came to the End, this is a story about stable American lives unravelling. Tim Farnsworth has the life a lot of people dream of: partnership at an important law firm, and a beautiful, independent, but devoted wife. It’s not perfect. Their daughter Becka is struggling with a serious childhood and now teenage weight problem for reasons no one can seem to figure out. But the Farnsworths are pretty decent parents, trying their best to help her through this with her dignity intact.

No one in this family, however, is immune from self-destructive compulsions. When the novel opens, Tim is struggling, once again, with a condition so inexplicable he’s become a case study in The New England Journal of Medicine. No doctor has been able to explain what is triggering his disorder, whether it is physical or psychological, and why it stops as mysteriously as it starts. But for whatever reason, sometimes at night, sometimes during the day, Tim has the compulsion to start walking. And continue walking, until his body is no longer capable of walking anymore.

This was bad enough in years with normal winters, but by the time this novel is finished, Tim will have lost a few toes to frostbite, and found himself in some seriously dangerous situations. Meanwhile, what is an authentically loving wife supposed to do with this? Especially after it becomes more and more evident that Tim is on track to destroy his career.

In the first few chapters, Jane comes off as the classic enabler. As soon as Tim starts walking, she’s ready with the backpack of protective gear, and the GPS, willing to put her life entirely on hold to pick him up when he drops from exhaustion. But as the mysteries of his disease unfold, it’s hard not to become as convinced as Jane that Tim really has no control over this compulsion, and that if she isn’t vigilant, he’ll walk until he dies.

The Unnamed is an often brutal and deeply moving novel that is relentless in its portrait of how fragile North American lives really are, and how little we still know about the mind or the body. It might not sell a lot of copies this month. But my guess is it will sell well over time, make more than a few awards lists next fall, and push Ferris more comfortably into the top tier of serious American writers.

THE UNNAMED BY JOSHUA FERRIS,
LITTLE BROWN, HC., 313 PP., $29.99