Their days of extravagant anomie are shaped by a patchwork of kitchen gossip, emails and snippets that filter down from the office of their forbidding boss, Lynn Mason. Rugged founding heroes give way to polo-shirted drones horizons shrink to the fibreboard walls of an office cubicle and, in an attention-grabbing display of virtuosity, the reassuring omniscient narrator is replaced by a stressed-out, first-person plural.įerris's 'we' is a fractious, hydra-headed array of copywriters and art directors, from upbeat networker Karen Woo to grizzled, reclusive Frank Brizzolera. But in Joshua Ferris's debut novel of life and death in an ailing Chicago ad agency, times have changed. America, that country's favourite myth insists, was built by the individual: the 'calm, mature' man praised by de Tocqueville Emerson's self-reliant 'true prince'.
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