I took a fiction-writing course from Barry Hannah (Airships, Geronimo Rex)  years ago, and wrote a short story called “Work” that he dismissed out of hand. (well, he did like one sentence in it.) It was about fear and loathing and paranoia resulting from some petty changes in titles at a corporate office. Hannah said, “Nobody cares about work. They read fiction to escape from it.”  I have to say, when I read about Joshua Ferris’s book Then We Came to the End  (Little, Brown, $24), and learned that it was mostly, almost only, about work, it didn’t make me want to snatch it up. But the reviews were so good, and it was on The New York Times’ list of five best fiction works of 2007. So I got it, and no regrets. Opposite. In fact, when I finished I went back and read it again because it was so funny. (I’m  laughing right now about a description in this Ferris book of a guy whose creaky crutches made him sound like a 19th century whaler.) 

This is the Office Space  of novels. It’s been compared to Catch-22   and that seems fair. What Joseph Heller did to the military in Catch-22  he tried to do to work in Something Happened,   but that book just made me grimace.

Then We Came to the End  is life contained in three floors, 60 stories up, in a Chicago office building. The narrator is the corporate “we,” vindictive, selfish, irrational and hilarious. It’s an addictive voice that nails the petty collective life of the cubicle. “How we hated our coffee mugs! our mouse pads, our desk clocks, our daily calendars, the contents of our desk drawers. Even the photos of our loved ones taped to our computer monitors for uplift and support turned into cloying reminders of time served.” And the insane way modern life separates work from reality: “What sort of person showed up on Monday and had no interest in sharing what transpired during the two days of the week when one’s real life took place?” There are included in the “we” a lot of fully realized, recognizable characters — Marcia, whose hair and music are stuck in the ’80s; Lynn Mason, the elegant and inscrutable boss; Tom Mota, who should have been a landscaper; Benny, whose office is gossip central.

And there’s a nice  revelation about “us” at the very end.