You’re likely to relish Joshua Ferris’s acclaimed debut novel, Then We Came to The End, if you enjoy narratives that revoice the 19th century’s omniscient narrator as a sardonic first-person-plural Greek chorus in the style of The Virgin Suicides.Even if you don’t fall into that audience category, anyone who’s ever worked in an office “environment” might find themselves annoying their bedside reading companion by yukking with laughter every 7 minutes while racing through this slick text.Just as the substance of one’s 9-to-5 dramas seems opaque (or worse, pathetic) to those not immersed in those particular office politics, the texture and the humour of Ferris’s book might seem flat or contrived if quoted out of context–the context here being the increasingly unhinged behaviour of a group of work-shy advertising peons in the wake of the dot-com crash. For example, the decision of one character to speak to his colleagues for a month using only quotes from the Godfather movies (I and II but not III, obviously) might seem too cute pitched cold. But it is, I promise, funny on the page. Similarly, could someone unfamiliar with the book grasp why Ferris’s characters initially detest the slightly senior Joe Pope, with the rationale for their loathing focusing on Pope’s habit of wheeling his bike into the office and then locking the front wheel to the frame, as though “beset on all sides by thieves and barbarians”? But of course you can. You’ve worked in an office.