By Colin Frawley
Road novels can be great fun – pick up Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” or Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49” for a look at the merits of tetherless adventuring.
These types of stories provide boundless opportunities for zany encounters of every variety. It’s a great setup for a tale, allowing a character to drink in a bounty of culture while in pursuit of a singular goal.
Unless there’s no culture.
Unless there’s no goal.
So, what happens when a travel book fixes its gaze on its own feet? You get Joshua Ferris’ “The Unnamed.”
Ferris’ follow up to his debut novel, 2007’s National Book Award-nominated “Then We Came to the End,” starts off as a domestic drama with a pathological twist. New York City lawyer Tim Farnsworth is doing exceptionally well compared to most men in their late forties: He has settled comfortably into partnership at his longtime law firm, looks great for his age, and has a relatively solid relationship with his wife Jane. At the novel’s outset, however, he walks into the couple’s house wearing a grave expression and simply announces, “It’s back.”
What’s “back” is Tim’s long-dormant but inexplicable disease, which causes him to walk uncontrollably over excessive distances. He might be sitting in his corner office, meeting with a client or preparing a report, when he will simply shoot up and out of the building and begin a long jaunt to nowhere. It’s an original concept that leaves the door open to a multitude of possibilities for Tim. Unfortunately, the whole thing becomes repetitive almost instantly – all of Tim’s early journeys just end with Jane picking him up late at night.
Ferris characterizes Jane mainly by showing us how she deals with Tim’s affliction. In this light, she is a fantastically sympathetic character: Despite the annoyance of having to continually fetch her husband from odd places at odd hours, Jane is unflaggingly supportive and faithful. Through all of her patient suffering, Ferris manages to avoid drawing her as a submissive, do-all China doll: Jane works in real estate. Jane keeps the couple’s pissy teenage daughter on track in school. She goes to incredible lengths to make sure her husband is comfortable. Strong and prudent and always believable, her character is one of “The Unnamed”’s greatest triumphs.
This little victory demonstrates that Ferris is more than capable of getting down to ground level and really living inside his stories. As such, it’s a little tragic that he doesn’t perform this task more frequently throughout the novel. While the first half of “The Unnamed” provides the reader with a nuanced, detailed picture of a strained family situation, the book hits cruise control halfway through and never puts its foot back on the accelerator.
Three days after finishing this novel, I’m still wondering why Ferris bothers to give us a cast of such authentic characters. All he does in the second half of “The Unnamed” is remove us from them. It’s not giving away all that much to reveal that Tim eventually takes off for good, backpacking aimlessly around the U.S. with nothing but his next camp site in mind (supposedly for the good of the family, which I don’t buy for a minute). Meanwhile, the reader is stuck in his consciousness, which never grapples with anything more than garden variety existential angst – mind vs. body, religion vs. secularism, etc. The novel’s promising setup gives way to an excruciatingly cyclical journey through cardboard landscapes featuring throwaway characters. It’s as though Ferris needed a novel-length story, but didn’t know what to do with his protagonists, his premise or his talent. I have a hard time believing this is the most careful work of a National Book Award-nominated novelist.
I would love to see a rewrite of “The Unnamed” that preserves the first half and takes the rest in a new direction. There is too much emotional investment here to be wasted on such a lazy and unsatisfying ending. “The Unnamed” shows that Ferris still has the chops to hold a reader’s interest – but it also shows that those chops aren’t hot enough to let him sleepwalk through a project without people noticing.
People still read, Joshua. Next time, please – give us a little something for the effort.
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