Ferris' Account Of an 'Unnamed' Mental Affliction

“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.”

There is something cruelly funny about the image of a middle-aged corporate lawyer struggling to tear a custom-tailored suit with his bare hands. It almost belongs more in Joshua Ferris’ debut, “Then We Came to the End”—an acrid satire of the cubicle workplace—or the sitcom “The Office” than in his new novel “The Unnamed.” Though Ferris retains his humor in his new book, he seems to have adjusted its saturation levels. While the comedy of “Then We Came to the End” was tinged with pathos, “The Unnamed” is tragic, but gilded with heartbreaking humor. While previously Ferris might have left this character shouting obscenities or doing something equally outrageous, here Tim is left collapsed in the arms of his wife, as eviscerated as his expensive work-wear.

Tim Farnsworth, a partner at a high-profile Manhattan law firm, is afflicted with sudden bouts of uncontrollable walking. Despite the strong deterrent of an East Coast winter and the responsibilities he may have to his family and job, Tim walks for hours—unsure of his destination, unable to stop, and unconcerned with his bodily pains. Eventually these hours become years. Despite countless visits to doctors and more dubious specialists, the cause of the walking remains unknown and the disease unnamed, thus the novel’s title.

In tearing apart his suit, Tim turns the daily routine of changing after work into something eccentric—an act of destruction and frustration. Mirroring this act throughout the novel, Ferris takes the typical—corporate America, illness, marriage, and mortality—and reinvigorates it. “The Unnamed” is a poignant, though not always cohesive narrative. A subplot at Tim’s office involving a murder investigation—a trial that he botched when he took ill—distracts from the account of his illness and its effects on those around him. Nevertheless, Tim’s psychological journey remains the compelling heart of the novel.

Exasperated by the illness’s return, Tim rips his suit just as it will tear apart his seemingly perfect life—complete with an attractive, loving wife, a high-paying job that he loves, and an 8-bedroom mansion in the suburbs. Sensing his oncoming relapse, Tim contemplates what he stands to lose: “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.” This is not simply a story about one man and his tragic fall—rather, the novel chronicles a disease as it ravages a man, his family, and his life.

Ferris effectively uses the illness as a foil to the pernicious corporate environment to which Tim belongs, taking up the critique that he began in his first novel, but on a different front. It is this premise of two opposing ailments as they compete for Tim’s life that distinguishes “The Unnamed” from among a field of clichéd and poorly written romantic tragedies.

As he surveys his rococo carpets and marble counter, Tim only sees the material objects that his corporate job handed him—failing to recognize the family that it had already taken away. His relationships with his wife and daughter have been unknowingly frayed because of his long hours and lack of emotional presence. Though the illness steals the tangible comforts—the house, the office with a view, and even a few frostbitten fingers and toes­it leaves behind the immaterial and the eternal—love, devotion, and his mind. By forcing Tim to reevaluate what is most important to him, the illness reverses the apathy and obliviousness that his job and fortune created in his personal life. He is compelled to value what he does have, renewing his relationship with his wife Jane and beginning one with his daughter Becka, until then largely ignored.

Years after the first attack of the disease, Jane and Becka are still unaccustomed to the worry that grips them as they ride in the car, searching for a lone hunched figure as he limps on. Becka, who was at first suspicious of the reality of her father’s illness, finds a renewed sense of compassion for her his struggles: “She felt the deep deficit of not being omniscient and the insecurity of human limitations that a time of crisis lays bare. They’d never find him. They had already passed him. He was standing in front of them mile after mile but they were too blind and frantic to see.” Not only does the disease afflict Tim; it torments his wife and daughter as they realize their inability to find, comfort, and save him. Ferris painstakingly captures the psychology of each member of the Farnsworth family, as they cycle through anger, indignation, grief, resignation, and acceptance—sometimes alone and sometimes together.

Ferris is at his best when he focuses on Tim’s struggle with his illness, his job, and his family life. But in intermittently weaving a murder mystery through the novel, Ferris fractures the stylistic, thematic, and narrative unity without adding much to the development of characters or plot. Grisham-like clichés interrupt a compelling account of sickness and struggle. Bland elementary characters from this extraneous and gratuitously blood-spattered thriller story-line are introduced and annoyingly revisited.

Though this ridiculously out-of-place whodunit detracts from the success of the work as a whole, it does not do quite the damage that Tim does to his suit jacket. Ferris sustains his novel with lyrical sentences and piercing images—a wife and daughter squinting in the dark to spot a man lost in his own body, a ripped suit and a grown man on his knees, and expensive copper pots sparkling in the light, unused. In “The Unnamed,” Ferris begins to depart from the theatrical and outlandish antics of his literary debut, tackling a story of emotional turmoil and loss with stirring power.

—Staff writer Kristie T. La can be reached at kla@fas.harvard.edu.