Book Review: The Unnamed

Published on Friday 12 February 2010 16:24

THE UNNAMED Joshua Ferris Hamish Hamilton, £12.99

TIM Farnsworth, the unaccountably restless main character in Joshua Ferris's second novel, can't stop walking. Nobody knows why, and The Unnamed takes its title from Tim's peculiar condition. Is it medical? Is it spiritual? Or is it metaphorical in ways that suggest Ferris's readers had better beware?

This much is clear about Tim's condition, it is conducive to authorial overkill. So, as Ferris writes about Tim, somehow conveying Tim's self-pity through his third person narrative voice, he gives The Unnamed a writerly preciousness that is as tangible as Tim's problem is vague.

The novel opens with a section called "The Feet, Mechanical" which is suggestive of "The Syntax, Adorable" and introduces a cold winter through which Tim will begin to wander. "The cold was mother of invention, a vengeful mother whose lessons were delivered at the end of a lash," Ferris writes prettily, too prettily, on this novel's opening page.

Leaving behind his prestigious job at a law firm, his suburban house, his wife of 20 years and a daughter who wears dreadlocks, Tim becomes a hobo, albeit the kind of hobo whose wife packs his trail mix, base layer of thermal long underwear and GPS. In Tim's case, as The Unnamed begins, the condition has manifested itself twice before, so he and his family know the drill. His wife, Jane, does her best to keep him safe and warm and to find him each time he disappears.

At the law firm where Tim works and none of his colleagues like or trust one another, the mood is sufficiently flippant and ironic to accommodate much kinkier personal problems than Tim's. But he scares the other lawyers, particularly when he comes to work wearing a custom-made brain helmet over his newly shaved head. He becomes a pariah.

Tim feels as if he's got off several gerbil wheels: the wheels of work, of medical treatment and of suburban family life. But The Unnamed is a literal Ferris wheel for the reader, since it brings Tim through ups and downs so cyclical they make the book seem to be going nowhere. Will Jane stay loyal to Tim? What if she develops her own problems? Will his body stay intact, or will his fingers and toes start falling off? Will he keep winding up in one quirky setting after the next? "I can't keep waking up in potato chip trucks," he tells Jane after finding himself in one painted with the Utz logo. "No," Jane says, "I guess you can't."

If only she were right. Ferris gives himself little choice but to keep on making Tim's situation sadder. So Tim begins hearing a strange voice in his head. ("Good shoes are not simply a luxury," says the voice. "Funny looks from funny male strangers are unsettling. A change in bowel habits is cause for alarm.") He becomes enough of a derelict and a danger to be treated as a mental patient and given anti-psychotic drugs. "You go on and on," Ferris writes, trying to describe Tim's weary feeling, and certainly summarising this novel's. "Your one note gets repetitive, it's taxing. The crying, the lowing, the constant me me me."

Ferris surely means to write charmingly of a man and wife who call each other "banana" and who have been through endless shared battles with an unseen, undefinable threat. In fact he describes Tim, Jane and their daughter, Becka, with palpable affection. So it becomes that much more pitiful when he turns out to have given them no real way to withstand a biblical degree of suffering and sorrow. Yet he keeps their plight too lightweight and fanciful to invite real empathy. It's too easy to shrug off what happens in The Unnamed without imagining that it could happen to you.

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, February 14, 2010.