The Unnamed

by Joshua Ferris

Overview

Joshua Ferris' debut novel Then We Came to the End was both heralded by critics and a New York Times bestseller, and marked the arrival of a startlingly talented young writer. With THE UNNAMED, Ferris imagines the collision between one man's free will and the forces of nature that are bigger than any of us.

Tim Farnsworth walks. He walks out of meetings and out of bed. He walks in sweltering heat and numbing cold. He will walk without stopping until he falls asleep, wherever he is. This curious affliction has baffled medical experts around the globe--and come perilously close to ruining what should be a happy life. Tim has a loving family, a successful law career and a beautiful suburban home, all of which he maintains spectacularly well until his feet start moving again.

What drives a man to stay in a marriage, in a job? What forces him away? Is love or conscience enough to overcome the darker, stronger urges of the natural world? THE UNNAMED is a deeply felt, luminous novel about modern life, ancient yearnings, and the power of human understanding.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"It's something to behold, this book...a breathtaking debut."—Ain't It Cool News

"Ferris delivers an understated reading that is all the more moving for its subtlety...The audio features a not-to-be-missed interview with the author."—Publishers Weekly

"There isn't a moment when Ferris the reader loses one's attention to what Ferris the writer has to say."—AudioFile

Ain't It Cool News

"It's something to behold, this book...a breathtaking debut."

St. Petersburg Times

"Ferris' distinctive writing style is serious but whimsical, philosophical with a touch of the absurd."

The Miami Herald

"Bracingly original . . . Surprisingly, almost tenderly, and despite his unrelenting refusal to churn out a predictable happy ending, [Ferris] turns The Unnamed into a most unorthodox love story about commitment and sacrifice."

Christian Science Monitor

"The Unnamed is ambitious, intelligent, and even more complex than Ferris's debut novel, Then We Came to the End."

The Economist

"Mr. Ferris is wise enough not to teach a lesson. Rather, he has teased ordinary circumstances into something extraordinary, which is exactly what we want our fiction writers to do."

The Chicago Sun-Times

"There is beauty in Ferris' writing, even when charged with despair."

The San Francisco Chronicle

"At once riveting, horrifying and deeply sad, The Unnamed, like Tim's feet, moves with a propulsion all its own. This is fiction with the force of an avalanche, snowballing unstoppable until it finally comes to rest-when we come to the end, so to speak."

GQ

"Where Then We Came to the End mined the minutiae of cubicle life for humor and pathos, this one goes straight for the heart (and the jugular), telling the story of a married father struggling with an inexplicable disease, and the lengths to which he'll go to maintain control of his life."

The Wall Street Journal

"Riveting."

The Boston Globe

"Strange and beguiling . . . With this brave and masterful novel, Ferris has proven himself a writer of the first order. The Unnamed poses a question that could not be more relevant to the America of 2010: Will the compulsions of our bodies defeat the contents of our souls?"

The Washington Post

"You can't break away from the grip of these opening chapters . . . Ferris usually writes in a steady, cool voice whether delivering the quotidian details of office work or existential observations about God that would otherwise sound grandiose. The effect is a terrifying portrayal of intermittent mental illness, the way the fear of relapse becomes a kind of specter, mocking each recovery and shredding any hope of a cure."

O Magazine

"Ferris shows a talent for the grotesque in his riveting descriptions of Tim's decline. He also includes his specialty - scenes of juicy office intrigue. But what's most engrossing in his portrait of a couple locked in an extreme version of a familiar conflict - the desire to stay together versus an inexplicable yearning to walk away."

The New York Times

"[Ferris is] a brilliant and funny observer."

The Los Angeles Times

"Ferris puts his notable wit and observational ability aside in favor of a far more psychological (and ultimately physical) examination of the self. . . . an accomplished and daring work by a writer just now realizing what he is capable of creating."

Very Short List

"Astonishing and compelling."

The New Yorker

"An unnerving portrait of a man stripped of civilization's defenses. Ferris's prose is brash, extravagant, and, near the end, chillingly beautiful."

Salon

"Unfold[s] in a hushed, shadowed dimension located somewhere between myth and a David Mamet play."

Time

"Rich and profound."

starred review Booklist

"Ferris imbues his story with a sense of foreboding, both for the physical world, in the grip of record-breaking temperatures, and for the vulnerable nuclear family and its slow unraveling. With its devastating metaphoric take on the yearning for connection and the struggles of commitment, Ferris brilliantly channels the suburban angst of Yates and Cheever for the new millennium."

author of ABSURDISTAN and THE RUSSIAN DEBUTANTE'S Gary Shteyngart

"Arresting, ground-shifting, beautiful and tragic. This is the book a new generation of writers will answer to. No one in America writes like this."

AudioFile

"There isn't a moment when Ferris the reader loses one's attention to what Ferris the writer has to say."

Library Journal

Attorney Tim Farnsworth has lately been falling prey to a compulsion to walk away from home and job and to keep walking, until he collapses from exhaustion. National Book Award finalist Ferris (Then We Came to the End) lays out the toll this takes on his body, marriage, and career in nearly sadistic detail. There exists a delicious tension between the compassionate tone with which he reads this very sad tale and the horrors he inflicts on his characters as author. Beautifully written (though Ferris may be overreaching in his musings on Cartesian dualism); an excellent choice for any library. [The Little, Brown hc was "highly recommended," LJ 11/1/09; producer Scott Rudin (No Country for Old Men) has bought the film rights.—Ed.]—John Hiett, Iowa City P.L.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170293070
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	01/18/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

Related Subjects

• Fiction
• Literature
• Awards
• American Fiction
• Science Fiction & Fantasy
• Fiction Subjects
• 21st Century American Fiction
• Body, Mind & Health - Fiction
• Occupations - Fiction
• Literary Fiction
• Love & Relationships - Fiction
• Disease - Fiction
• Lawyers - Fiction
• Literary Fiction - Other
• Marriage - Fiction
• Soils->Scotland->Girvan region
• New Yorker's Favorite Fiction & Poetry of 2010
• Slate's Favorite Fiction of 2010

Read an Excerpt

The Unnamed

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By Ferris, Joshua

Reagan Arthur / Back Bay Books

Copyright © 2010 Ferris, Joshua
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780316034005

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THE FEET, MECHANICAL

1

It was the cruelest winter. The winds were rabid off the rivers. Ice came down like poisoned darts. Four blizzards in January alone, and the snowbanks froze into gray barricades as grim and impenetrable as anything in war. Tombstones were buried across the cemetery fields and cars parked curbside were swallowed undigested. The long-term debate about changing weather was put aside for immediate concern for the elderly and the shut-ins, while the children went weeks without school. Deliveries came to a halt and the warehouses clogged up on days the planes were approved to land. There were lines at the grocery store, short tempers, a grudging toward the burden of adjustment. Some clever public services addressed the civic concerns—heat shelters, volunteer home checks. The cold was mother of invention, a vengeful mother whose lessons were delivered at the end of a lash.

The ride home was slow going because of the snow and the traffic. He usually worked by eyelet light but this evening he brought no work home and sat in one quadrant of the car without file opened or pen in hand. They were waiting for him. They didn’t know they were waiting for him. The driver had on 1010 WINS, traffic and transit on the ones. Somewhere, out to sea or in the South, it might not be snowing. Here it slanted into the windshield like white ash from a starburst. The frostbite had returned to his fingers and toes. He unbuckled the seat belt and leaned over, stretching his long torso across the backseat, and what the driver thought he didn’t care. The sound of the radio faded as one ear was sealed up by the distressed leather and he put a hand on the floor mat and ran his tingling fingertips over the fiber-trapped pebbles. He hadn’t called to tell them. He had lost his phone. They were waiting for him, but they didn’t know it.

The driver woke him when they reached the house.

He was going to lose the house and everything in it. The rare pleasure of a bath, the copper pots hanging above the kitchen island, his family—again he would lose his family. He stood just inside the door and took stock. Everything in it had been taken for granted. How had that happened again? He had promised himself not to take anything for granted and now he couldn’t recall the moment that promise had given way to the everyday. It was not likely one single moment. He set his keys on the table below the mirror and uncharacteristically took his shoes off on the long Persian runner, which he and Jane had bought in Turkey. They had spent a week in Turkey and a week in Egypt. They always had a trip in the works. Their next trip was a Kenyan safari but it would have to be postponed now. He walked through the house in his socks. Inside the kitchen he ran his hand along the dimly lit countertop. He loved his kitchen, the antique cupboard doors, the Moroccan tile backsplash. He walked through the dining room, where they hosted dinner parties for his firm. The long table sat twelve. He reached the stairs and put his hand on the oak newel and took one step after another. Family photographs made the ascent with him. The sound of the grandfather clock ticking away in the living room gave way to the television laughter issuing softly from the bedroom down the hall.

Jane was still beautiful. She was wearing a pair of reading glasses that had a Pop Art zaniness of character, teardrop frames polka-dotted with drops of primary color. Spaghetti straps revealed her slender arms and the nightgown held her firm breasts in place just below a freckled slate and an articulated clavicle. She was doing the crossword. Whenever she got stuck, she glanced up at the late show on the flat screen mounted to the wall and drummed the pen between upper and lower teeth, as if to waken her brain. She looked at him as he entered, surprised to see him home so early. “Hello, banana,” she said. He took off his suit coat as if it were a T-shirt, thrusting the back over his head and turning his sleeves inside out. Then he found himself grabbing the hem, a hand on each half of the parted tail, and ripping the thing in two. Hard to break the seam at first, but once the first thread snapped, it went. Jane opened her mouth but nothing came out. He dropped the tattered coat and climbed onto the bed and hunkered down on his hands and knees like a man waiting for an explosion. “What is it?” she said. “Tim, what is it?” His head was lost inside his sheltering arms. “Tim?” She moved over to him and put her arms around him, hugging him from above as if they were about to engage in a wrestling match. “Tim?”

He told her that he had been forced out of the building and into the street. At 43rd and Broadway he hailed a cab, which he hoped would take him back to the office. After getting the cab to pull over, he reached out and opened the back door. But then he walked on. The driver, a Sikh in a pink turban, honked the horn, staring at him through the rearview mirror. Why would someone hail a cab and open the door only to keep walking? Near Union Square he had tried to call an ambulance, a recourse they had envisioned during his last recurrence. He was on the line with a dispatcher trying to explain the situation when he slipped on a patch of ice coming off a curb and lost his grip. “My phone!” he cried out as he regained his balance. “Somebody! My phone!” He walked on with a tweaked back. “Please get my phone!” Everyone ignored him. His BlackBerry had landed in the middle of the street where it lay defenseless against oncoming cars. He kept moving forward. He told her of all the city scaffolding he walked under, the manic traffic he managed to avoid, the parade of oblivious people he passed. He told her that he had turned tired in the old way by the time he reached a bench, somewhere near the East River, where his body gave out. How he had crumpled up his suit coat for a pillow and taken off his tie, sweating despite the cold. How he woke up in horror an hour later.

“It’s back,” he said.

Continues...

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Excerpted from The Unnamed by Ferris, Joshua Copyright © 2010 by Ferris, Joshua. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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