The Unnamed

I have dipped my little toe into the book world and almost drowned.  It is an overwhelming torrent of an impossibly large number of pages, blogs, books, magazines and all things penned.  Had I plunged my whole foot in I would have been ripped from solid ground and been lost.  But in dipping my little toe in, I discovered a book about which there was much hype.  That book is Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed.  Upon its release every outlet that I follow that talks about books was talking about this one, so I was naturally excited to get it.  I believe that the hype was well placed and that this book satisfied as any good story can.

First of all, it is wholly original.  The protagonist, Tim Farnsworth, is a powerful lawyer for a powerful firm.  He has a beautiful wife who loves him, and a typical teenage daughter who tries to avoid contact with her parents as much as possible.  Tim is a genuinely satisfied man.  Except for his disease.  He walks.  And it is this unique conflict that the reader must simply accept, and suspend belief in an irrational, illogical disease.  If you are unable to believe in a walking disease then don't bother.  But Ferris' words are quite convincing.  Tim spontaneously starts walking, while at work, while in court, wakes up from being asleep, and just starts walking.  Not even exhaustion stops him, his body carries him further than he imagines possible.  After a walking spell he collapses, falls into the deepest of sleep, and then wakes up and calls his wife to come and get him. Wherever he might be.

The second satisfying aspect of this book is that it is about marriage; and that marriage is good.  In a society where divorce is rampant and the Christian culture isn't immune, it is stunning and refreshing to read a book that praises a strong marriage, and encourages staying together in the face of struggles-especially in the face of struggles.  One passage in particular gave me an image of what I would hope to experience with Laura in 20 years.  Tim and his wife, Jane, meet up for lunch after their working mornings, "Later that day at an early lunch they talked about what had transpired since breakfast, which was nothing, really, but they talked as if they hadn't seen each other in a while.  They had lived another half a day and that time had gone by without incident and they were together again, and this alone made them talkative."  It is the simplicity of this scene that I love.  They had been through the most difficult of times and yet here in an unremarkable moment they take joy in nothing more than the company of each other. 

But that is by no means the end of the story.  Without giving too much of the story away, it is easy to see how Tim's walking disease is really just an allegory for cancer, or Alzheimer's, or some other disastrous malady that can plague a person and wreck a couple and a family.  But this story's strength lies in the hope of the strength that a loving, committed family can provide. 

At first, I fell in love with the way this book took on the challenge of showing the thrill and struggle of marriage.  As it progressed into more of a drama I was surprised but captivated by the plot, and when I was tricked into a sense of sympathetic recovery I couldn't wait to get to the real resolution.  I wanted to skip ahead, and I didn't really care about the journey through the remaining pages that I would miss.  Except that I did care.  I just wanted to stay up all night to finish this story.  So I give this book a solid recommendation.  There is repeated use of the big eff, but it is grouped into bursts and then ignored for some time.  Also, there is sex in this book.  There are no graphic, drawn out descriptions, but there are passages about the nocturnal joys of marriage. 

The Unnamed is 310 pages.