By Reviewer: Kevin Rabalais
Fiction
To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
JOSHUA FERRIS
Viking, $29.99
The writer who achieves success with a debut faces an unenviable decision. Write another version of the same book or break from expectations. The first scenario permits the audience to move fluidly from one book to the next. In the latter, the writer risks losing readers but commits to establishing the poles of his or her potential. Think of David Malouf and the radical progression from Johnno to An Imaginary Life. Not until the publication of his third novel, Fly Away Peter, could readers see the shape and connections.
Progression: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris, is his third book and his audience will be able to join the dots to earlier works.
Joshua Ferris has chosen a similar route. Many of the fans he gained with Then We Came to the End (2007), his debut satire about ad agency office culture at the end of the ’90s internet boom, found themselves bemused after the publication of The Unnamed (2010), an idea-driven novel about a man afflicted with a modern malaise that causes him to step out of his seemingly perfect life and start walking – without end or destination.
With the publication of Ferris’s sharp and often prescient third novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, which has been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, readers have a clearer view into the progression of his growing and bold body of work.
The novel’s narrator, Paul O’Rourke, a Park Avenue dentist in his late thirties, still struggles with childhood memories of his father’s suicide. He’s also getting over a recent affair with his office manager whose family allowed him to dabble in Judaism. O’Rourke spends long hours staring into decaying mouths. This provides ample time for him to ponder various forms of corrosion, mainly spiritual, before settling into a baseball game featuring his beloved Boston Red Sox. He finds himself most at home alone during the games or in suburban shopping malls, where – alone – he examines a certain kind of Americana that allows him to hone his philosophy.
‘‘A mall can make you feel alive again if you go there only to watch and if you watch without judgment, looking kindly upon the concerted shoppers, who have no choice about buying or not buying, it would seem, and who would not want that choice – not if it meant no longer knowing what to want,’’ Ferris writes.
A non-native New Yorker and, therefore, an exile among Yankees fans, O’Rourke finds himself disconnected, a modern-day Crusoe in an era when connectivity resembles oxygen. He attempts to engage with others by writing anonymous internet posts about the Red Sox. He also pursues communication with his small staff devoted to their smartphones, or what Ferris terms ‘‘me-machines’’. Without his permission, someone starts a website for O’Rourke’s practice, and he must engage the faceless nemesis. Facebook and Twitter accounts open in O’Rourke’s name, and although the posts echo his ideas, he remains adamant that someone – a poser, perhaps a double, one whose life proves more intriguing than his own – is either trying to steal his identity or remind him that he’s not fully alive.
Ferris writes with raw energy and a voice-driven style whose concerns and observations recall a young Saul Bellow. His descriptions are often arresting, as when he writes of the ‘‘mutt-like men’’ at a strip club: ‘‘They were generic remnants of a gene pool drifting out with the tide, leaving them naked and lost beneath the moon’s blank guidance.’’
The momentum that propels the early stages of the novel begins to falter when discussions of religion overtake the narrative. What begins as insightful, such as the tweet, ‘‘Freedom of religion in America is all fine and good until you start believing in nothing, and that is a crime to be punished’’, ultimately becomes muddled and, O’Rourke fears, anti-Semitic.
Ferris’s novels all examine a culture overly connected to the point of being disconnected and, therefore, incapable of expressing itself and its desires. At its best, his latest reminds us, as O’Rourke learns, ‘‘that what separated the living from one another could be as impenetrable as whatever barrier separated the living from the dead’’. In his search to find something to believe, whether it be baseball or religion, O’Rourke reflects on our culture and fears in order to find stillness amid the frenzy, and in it, a new direction for living.