The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris

Little, Brown & Company, January 2010

     Tim Farnsworth has it all – a partnership at a successful Manhattan law firm, a spacious house in the suburbs, a beautiful wife and teenage daughter. It would seem an idyllic life, were it not for the inexplicable malady afflicting him. In short, Tim is compelled to walk.

     The urge strikes suddenly, unpredictably. Tim is unable to resist as his body carries him away from his home, his office, his life – far away, until the episode runs its course and Tim, exhausted from the pedestrian miles, collapses. Tim spends much of his life in remission from the unnamed disease of the novel’s title, but when the walking fits take hold, they linger for months at a time and wreak havoc on Tim’s career and family, threatening to tear his happy life asunder.

The Unnamed is a positively engrossing novel – a page turner utterly dissimilar from Joshua Ferris’ 2007 debut, Then We Came to the End. In that book, Ferris plied his considerable talents with dialogue and character to tell a story about office life, corporate cubicle culture. In The Unnamed, these same skills are employed in rendering what is at once a story of love and family and a thoughtful reflection upon the duality of human nature and the fleeting nature of life’s precious moments.

     This story of one family’s slow unraveling is heartbreaking, more so because Ferris, within the span of a few chapters, shapes these individuals as deep and sympathetic characters. You know them, you like them, and now you’re held in rapt attention at their downward spiral.

Ferris is a powerful wordsmith, and his prose is a pleasure to read. The Unnamed is not without its faults, however. There are matters of plot that never quite get resolved, and at times the needle of narration seems to jump its groove. Ferris loses direction toward the novel’s end, wandering much in the way his protagonist does, but by this point I was already well hooked into story and character, and I let the marvelous descriptions and elegant turns of phrase carry me to the book’s conclusion.

http://contemporarylit.about.com/od/fiction/fr/the-unnamed.htm