Wow, it’s been almost twenty years since I read Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came To The End, which describes a failing ad agency and the rounds of layoffs leading to its closure. I liked that book quite a lot–as you know, gentle reader, I had just finished a couple years’ service at a digital marketing agency about that time, so it really spoke to me. That was his first book; seven years after, this was his first book. I’m not sure where I got it; it’s not on a Good Book Hunting post. It’s even possible I got it at Barnes and Noble on the discounted shelves as the price tag indicates. We will never know. An event in history, lost, unimportant except for its loss.
At any rate: This book deals with a dentist with mental illness, whose father committed suicide before the narrator reached double digits in age. Forty years later, he’s a dentist with a small but successful practice in Manhattan who lives in Brooklyn, alone and deeply lonely even though he ends up pushing people away. In flashback, he talks about relationships he’s had in college and after–one with a Roman Catholic girl with a conservative Catholic family, another with an Jewish woman with a big family–a relationship he started with a temp he hired and who still works with him after the relationship ends. In both cases, he gives himself unhealthily, hoping to join a big, loving family that he never had. But, ultimately, he admits to being an atheist to both families, which drives a wedge between them. The MacGuffin is that someone starts to impersonate him on the Internet, creating a Web site for his practice, commenting on news posts, and starting a Twitter feed in his name and to post some “apocrypha” from a people mentioned briefly in the Bible, where the distant descendents have been persecuted worse than the Jews. A member of that tribe has started reaching out to these descendents and is teaching them about their heritage–and the dentist meets a couple of others in the line and a researcher who is trying to bring them together to visit their homeland in Israel.
But: This is really more of an atmospheric book than anything else. We’ve got parallel stories, where a billionaire financier meets with the narrator. Also a member of the descendents of the hidden-from-history people, he, too. The researcher also has a parallel story, as decades ago he wooed an Orthodox Jewess, going so far as to start the process of converting to Judaism and wanting to become a rabbi, but ultimately rebuffed by the girl’s rabbi father because he, the researcher, admits he does not want to believe in God, but wants to be part of a family and a persecuted tradition. And I guess the climax of the book is the billionaire and the dentist hearing the story of the researcher and maybe discovering it’s all probably invented, a way for him to find meaning and to impart it to others who are in his situation?
I dunno. I was waiting for some resolution, some twist to it. Is the whole thing in the narrator’s head? Is he just crazy? Definitely some indicators that it’s the case–in one episode, he has a meaningful conversation with someone in the know, and one of his employees asks him who he was talking to that might indicate such. But even though the–maybe this is the climax?–the numbered chapters end with him visiting a new patient at home to floss for him, something he does daily now (he reveals)–and we get a climactic play-in game for the Red Sox (the dentist so much a fan, it’s almost crazy)–we don’t get any resolution or change in the narrator. There’s an epilogue where he goes on a mission trip with his lead hygenist, a widow who is very Catholic but does not have a large family, but he does this annually or so with her. And the last paragraph is him agreeing to a pick-up game of cricket with local children. Is this supposed to represent a real change on his part, or is it all supposed to represent more of the same: hope for change, but not forthcoming.
So, as I said, a vibe book, too much effective writing for the story and theme it holds. There’s not a lot of bio of Ferris on the Internet that I could see, but something about his pace of output and the too much good writing made me think he’s a creative writing professor by day. My own creative writing professor and academic advisor whose total career to my college years was a collection of short stories, a novel, and editing a book (The Boundaries of Twilight, which I ordered and read whilst in college) and his career since then has been another collection of short fiction and another novel (which I have around here somewhere, along with his first collection of short fiction which I read in college but only borrowed from the library and whose acquisition I remember even though I don’t have a Good Book Hunting post on it).
I actually sat up from my reading recliner at one point most of the way through this book and thought, “Do I even like to read?” I’d spent months complaining to my beautiful wife on how much I was not enjoying That Hideous Strength and then a week or so saying the same thing about this book. Most of my book reports are not snarky, but they are kind of down on the books I read. But I read a lot of books that are not the core of what I like to read–junk genre fiction and the occasional headier work which I either enjoy and feel pleased to have read or I slag on them. So do I like to read, or do I just do it out of habit? I guess that is a very ringing disrecommendation of this book.
I am less likely to pick up a Ferris book I find in the wild, but he was not so much of a best seller that you see them strewn widely about. Which is good as I have thousands of books to read already, including a new James R. Wilder book to read, four from Dodge Merrin, as well as, I guess, two from C.J. Hribal. If I ever read again, which is “I will” since I’ve already started on the Wilder book and have continued to read old Ideals magazines throughout.
