Then We Came to the End v. Petropolis
presented by
MARCH 11, 2008 • ROUND ONE
Then We Came to the End
v. Petropolis
Judged by Anthony Doerr
TMN Contributing Writer Anthony Doerr lives in Idaho. He’s the author of three books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. His fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. Connections to this year’s competitors: “I have no author conflicts this year.”
Sasha Goldberg, our heroine in Petropolis, is chubby and forlorn, child of an oppressive mom and a runaway dad. She grows up mostly friendless in an asbestos-mining Siberian town called Asbestos 2. She gets knocked up, has a daughter, moves to Moscow without her daughter, signs on with a mail-order bride operation called Kupid’s Korner, gets engaged to a flesh-bag named Neal, moves to Arizona, flees Neal for Chicago, lives for a while with a creepy family in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, flees again to New York, and winds up on her long-lost father’s doorstep as a “big black girl in dirty red bubble jacket.” I won’t spoil the end.
Chances are you haven’t heard of this book, which lacks an obvious first novel gimmick but is full of heart and sentences like “His white shirt is strangely sheer, and Sasha can make out two islands of chest hair shaped like lungs in a medical drawing.” Despite some odd editorial lapses, this is a very good novel.
Chances are you have heard of Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, with its gimmicky-but-still-somehow-effective collective first-person narrator. (I.e., “We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise.”) On the surface, Ferris’s book is about a bunch of office stereotypes tasked with writing a humorous ad campaign about breast cancer. Beneath its surface, the novel transcends its cubicle-dweller stereotypes by crackling with the kind of desperate isolation and spiritual vacuity anyone who has worked for a corporation for 10 minutes will understand.
Both Petropolis and Then We Came to the End are by first-time novelists who live in Brooklyn (shocker). Both writers are sensitive, vital, and funny, and both manage to somehow blend Swift-ian satire and Flaubert-ian realism in much the same way that, say, watching Hill Street Blues on a Japanese television in a Lithuanian hotel while spilling crumbs of Pringles made in Geneva on a sweater made in Madagascar blends incongruity and reality. These books are about the absurdity of global capitalism. I hope lots of people read them.
Now for the verdict segment of this preposterous exercise. Petropolis is not an entirely cohesive novel and there are at least two chapters and a lot of tangents (Sasha imagines letters back to her daughter in Asbestos 2 in italics) that could have been trimmed away. But Petropolis does possess a historicism and a spaciousness that Then We Came to the End, which can feel stiflingly compartmentalized, does not.
Really, what you have to ask yourself in this, the most ridiculous (and therefore perhaps the most sincere) of book contests, is this: If you were boarding a long-haul flight, and some airline attendant announced a new, psychotic policy that passengers could bring only one book on board, and if I was standing right next to you, in full possession of my hugely limited wisdom, which one of these two books would I urge you to stick with?
I’d say Then We Came to the End. Ferris’s book made me laugh out loud 20 times, and the scene toward the end of the novel, when Benny Shassburger answers every one of his co-workers’ questions with quotes from The Godfather, made me fall off the couch.
Joshua Ferris is a creative creative creating creative creative. (You have to read the book to know what that means.) So is Anya Ulinich. I wish them both happy and healthy careers.
Advancing:
Then We Came to the End
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
KEVIN: I am very happy for the success of Joshua Ferris’s comic advertising novel written in the first-person plural, because my next novel is set in a Pittsburgh ad agency and written in the second-person plural (“Y’uns are fractious and underpaid…Y’uns’s mornings lack promise.”)
I actually just started Then We Came to the End and am enjoying it a lot. As a former ad agency creative myself, I’m asked a lot if I’ll ever want to write a novel about advertising, and the answer is always no because, in spite of the old writing adage, I’ve never been interested in writing what I know. I’m more interested in writing things I’m curious about, which is why my next novel is also about a squad of Arena Football all-stars shipwrecked with an all-male nude singing revue.
But I’m glad someone else has written a great novel about advertising. I might not have any desire to spend two years writing one, but it’s a pleasure to spend a week reading one.
JOHN: I want to warn you that I feel a lengthy response coming on, so brace yourself.
It strikes me that Then We Came to the End is one of those books that embodies a particular model for the book industry. A fresh voice, great cover, engaging and likable author, strong PR push, award nominations, and now victories have added up to some serious upwardly mobile mojo for Joshua Ferris, whose next novel isn’t even done and has already had the film rights snapped up by Scott Rudin. As a general believer in and cheerleader for books, I’m thrilled every time this sort of thing happens. I’d be more thrilled if it happened to me, but what are you going to do?
This year’s Then We Came to the End appears to be Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children, which has come on to the scene to strong reviews and lengthy author profiles. This time next year we’ll know if it also earns some prizes. Like Then We Came to the End, Beautiful Children’s author has a biography that informs and grounds the book, the interesting back-story that apparently confers some sort of additional authenticity on the quality of the work.
The previous year’s Then We Came to the End was Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics. I imagine there was an example the year before that, but as I get older I lose the ability to hold information in my head. That nugget probably got pushed out by me trying to learn the names of the new American Gladiators or something. (Note to self: Suggest Wolf as celebrity guest judge for next year’s Tournament of Books. A review done entirely in howling would likely be as coherent as a B.R. Myers effort.)
Anyway, here’s what I’m getting at: These books—Then We Came to the End, Beautiful Children, and Special Topics in Calamity Physics—are viewed by the book industry as fitting into a particular box. Now, it’s a good box, a beautiful box, and each of these books deserves the success it’s had, but for each of these successes, I’m going to guess there’s 50 or 100 or 500 novels with the same or very similar virtues, which the publishers bought and nurtured hoping to get their book into this box, but the cruel truth is there’s only room for one book in that box every year, not 50, 500, not even five. This is something everyone within the book industry knows, that the odds of their contender for this particular box is facing very long odds, and yet they keep trying. It is book publishing as lottery.
So each year, the cycle continues and the vast majority of these novels end up falling to the wayside like an American Gladiator’s challenger tumbling down the pyramid after being clotheslined by Fury. The variety of books that get published is astounding, but the books that anyone ever hears about remains incredibly small because we seem to have a shortage of boxes that are available for displaying the books to audiences. The industry makes assumptions about what people want based on what they’ve wanted in the past and then rinse and repeat over and over.
What I don’t understand, and have never understood, is why the book industry isn’t more interested in creating new boxes, great boxes, shiny boxes that fit more books.
You don’t see the floor-cleaning industry settling for the simple mop, broom, and vacuum model, do you? I don’t know about you, but in addition to those unglamorous items, I have a Swiffer, a Swiffer WetJet, a Roomba, and a SpotBot. Somehow they’ve convinced me that I couldn’t live without those things, and you know what? They’re right.
I’m not arguing that we need to treat each book like a snowflake that deserves a handcrafted plan for maximum PR and marketing, but I am suggesting that simply looking for stuff to put in last year’s box is a losing strategy. If nothing else, the Tournament of Books proves that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all book. I quite enjoyed Then We Came to the End, but my hunch is that there are many other first novels last year that I would’ve enjoyed just as much or more, but despite being a pretty engaged book person, I never heard of them. Going even further, I bet there are some books out there that can’t find agents or publishers because they don’t see the books fitting into any of these already existent boxes, rejecting the Roomba because we already have the DustBuster. Passing on the Swiffer because we all have old T-shirts.
What does it all mean? I don’t know, I have to go lie down. Thinking about the book industry makes my head hurt like Mayhem has been bashing on it with a giant Q-tip.