BOOK OF THE DAY: SHANE HEGARTYreviews The UnnamedBy Joshua Ferris Penguin, 313pp, £12.99
HAVING QUICKLY established himself as a remarkable talent through his first novel, Then We Came To The End, a sharply satirical tale of a company imploding during the dot-com bust, Joshua Ferris has been eyed with great expectation and a healthy fear that he may disappear into a sophomore slump.
The Unnamedis an intriguing follow up, taking on a quirky, inventive neurological disorder – a man's compulsion to get up, walk and just keep walking. In some hands, it would be a short story idea but Ferris decided to take this single idea and sustain it through 300 pages. That he manages it, with the novel suffering only occasional bouts of narrative cramp, confirms he is a writer of some brilliance.
The walker is Tim Farnsworth, a successful lawyer, living in a large house with his beautiful wife and typically morose teenage daughter, but who has previously succumbed to a condition that is announced immediately in the novel by the words: “It’s back.”
He has no control over his compulsion, no escape from it other than to feed it or to chain himself to the bed and trash it out. When he walks, it ends in exhaustion and sleep in wherever his body gives up, so that the gradual disintegration of his mind and body is accompanied by descriptions that relish in the medical consequences even if it takes on aspects of a textbook.
Other elements layer the story – murder mystery, office politics, tinges of the supernatural – but the walks are what propel the story forward. At times, Ferris does this with the wit that marked him out in his debut. The bad timing of his ambulatory spurts is treated with particular black humour, as is the social awkwardness, the bemusement of his law firm colleagues and crazed attempts at treatment. This is notable in the chapters during which he wears a modified bicycle hat everywhere.
Throughout, however, Ferris prods at the war between body and mind and the disintegration of Farnsworth’s life. An untreatable, undiagnosed and unpredictable condition – which may be physical and may be psychological – the plot device always has the potential to become repetitious and tedious, but Ferris paces the story excellently, toying with the structure in the middle section before flexing his muscles by aiming for something far more profound and epic in the final third. Here, it tires a bit, but never enough to collapse.
At one point, there is an almost direct reference to celebrated neurologist Oliver Sachs, and The Unnameddoes at times have the vigour of Sachs's seminal collection of odd cases The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat.He takes from that the fascination with the idea of the mind and body tussling in the most outrageous way, although it also has echoes of Tom McCarthy's recent novel Remainderfor the way in which a neurological quirk takes a character's motivations hostage.
Where it is weakest is in its attention to the satellite characters. Ferris is excellent at quick sketches of those encountered by Farnsworth either at work or on the road. But Ferris doesn’t quite give as much depth to Farnsworth’s wife Jane as is sometimes promised, despite some beautiful moments revolving around the dismantling of her own life. But that’s a quibble, because on the whole this novel works thanks to the clipped language, great dialogue and economic storytelling that brings a filmic quality to Ferris’s writing. He has survived second novel syndrome. We can look forward to number three.
Shane Hegarty is an Irish Timesjournalist. His most recent book is The Irish and Other Foreigners: From the First People to the Poles(Gill MacMillan)
