The jittery, underutilized "we" in question, as the book's first-person-plural voice relentlessly underscores (more on this later), consists of a barely distinguishable cast of demoralized idealists, ass-kissing alluvium, gormless cheerleaders and at least one self-absorbed sociopath. Anyone who's ever worked in an office will instantly recognize these characters, and Ferris gives them admirable dimension even as he chronicles their abortive attempts to bond (typically over gossip or stealth attacks on office golden boy Joe Pope)
So Ferris captures the pettiness, paranoia and alienation that drives corporate America's treadmill with uncanny insight and wisdom, and has a generous, if spottily timed, sense of the absurd to boot (one initially funny sequence about interoffice chair-swapping spills over into four punishing pages). What's missing from Then We Came to the End is tension: Beyond the off-chance that office iconoclast Tom Mota will pop up for a post-layoff shooting spree, or some clue as to why the group's manager, Lynn Mason, skipped out on cancer surgery, the story offers little to anticipate. Again, thematically consistent, but also dull as hell. Part of the problem is that troubling, omniscient "we." Hanging a novel on so nebulous a framework—is the narrator one of the protagonists? all of them? none?—is a neat literary trick, but its pervasiveness undermines Ferris' thesis that corporate collectivism subsumes individual identity in favor of a bullshit "team" mentality. Ferris seems as seduced in his way by such rah-rah insidiousness as Joe Pope, and his dedication to the "we" over convincing, fleshed-out "I"s suggests that he once quaffed some company's Kool-Aid and didn't mind the taste.
Fair enough—it can happen to the best of us. But despite a blessed break in Then We Came to the End's flat-affect tone and go-nowhere narrative about halfway through (a segment that turns out, brilliantly yet frustratingly, to be a metafictional lark), my boredom eventually morphed into outright anger. Maybe Ferris' scenario simply cuts too close to the bone and taps into my bitterness at having toiled in too many similarly uninvigorating day jobs over the years (yeah, yeah, poor me). I had the same experience back when The Office first got wide-scale Yank attention after its stateside DVD release. My then-boss loaned me the discs and urged me to watch; we worked in a stereotypically bland corporate HQ doing mundane work important only to the board of directors and stockholders, and he swore that I'd love the show. "It's just like this place."
And how: I barely got through the first episode. I've since revisited The Office and find it hilarious and spot-on, but at the time it was too reminiscent of my daily routine to bear after-work hours. Maybe I'll have a similar late epiphany about Then We Came to the End, but the chances that I'll read it again are about as likely as my asking for my old job back.