(Spoilers ahead, sorry.)

I believe this book was written on a dare: “write a funny book about September 11, without mentioning the actual event”. On its surface, Then We Came to the End is a white-collar version of Catch 22, a hilarious compendium of office hijinks set in an early twentieth century Chicago advertising agency, organized around a deliberately disjunctive timeline.

It’s only when you get, appropriately, to the end of the book that you discover the very specific moment in time when the events take place. The layoffs at this generically American ad agency are accelerating all throughout the summer of 2001, and they reach a sort of crescendo just before September 11 of that year. Then, to quote the book more or less to the word, we come to the end. But that leaves us with two crucial questions: who is we, and what is the end?

The novel is narrated in the first-person plural voice throughout, and it’s more or less the only book I’ve ever read to have made that choice. (The Genevieves does something similar, but is not nearly so consistent. Nor, in my view, so profound.) This choice is not a grammatical quirk, either: the We who narrate this book is an active character, a group with opinions and motives distinct from, and perhaps even stronger than, any of the individuals within the group. The group serves as a handy shield for its members: time and time again, the actions of the group dilute the accountability of any one individual, so that the group takes the blame for all of the sensless and cruel things that are done on its behalf, and no one really takes the blame. In point of fact there’s a good old-fashioned rant against exactly this shirking of responsibility - perhaps a rather unsubtle didactic choice, on the author’s part - about two-thirds of the way through the story. But as a reader, even with this rant in hand, it’s difficult to look too harshly upon this group: the We in the book is a cozy set of individuals who care about one another, who visit one another in the hospital, who pitch in evenings to help out a colleague in extreme distress, and so forth. This little workplace group is not quite a family, but it’s not so far from it, either.

Whatever we may think of this group, it is a group that comes to an end, after a summer full of layoffs, on September 11th. It’s possible to read this ending on its face: as the employees of the ad agency are fired, one by one, the group to which they belong ceases to exist. And that would be true, more or less, except for what we learn in the last chapter: that this group continues to be in touch, even years after the layoffs. I think the ending points at something much deeper; I don’t think that it’s any coincidence that this cozy, cruel little group of white-collar workers comes to an end on September 11th.

In my view the ad agency is a metaphor for American society. Certainly it’s an imperfect one, given the degree to which this story is ensconced in a very specific slice of upper-middle-class life. The characters in this book aren’t representative of American society as a whole, by a long shot. I don’t think they’re meant to be, except perhaps in comparison to the rest of the world: I suppose to many people in other countries, American society really does resemble a group of upper-class yahoos who sell stuff via slick marketing campaigns. In any case, if that metaphor makes a certain kind of sense, then the thing that is coming to an end in the fall of 2001 is not the camaraderie among a little social clique of coworkers, but rather a sense of shared purpose and national unity. Of course that is a rather strange conclusion to draw, when you consider that the immediate aftermath of September 11th was a massive spike in national unity and shared purpose. On the other hand it’s possible to look just a little bit past September 11th, to the war in Iraq and all of the well-justified dissent that engendered, as a sort of unraveling of that moment of shared purpose. That specific point may be drawing out the metaphor a little too far - but it is certainly reasonable to say that we’re now a long way from the feeling of national unity in late 2001, and it’d have been reasonable to say the same when this book was published, as well. And is our current climate of disunity a good thing, or a bad one? It’s difficult to say, given how kind, empathetic, but also monstrous, the We in this book (and the society it represents) can be.

It’s worth thinking about the characters who really stand apart from this group in the book. One of them, Lynn Mason, is a partner in the firm, the boss to whom every employee reports. She is unapproachable and aloof, her life is impossible to imagine - until, that is, we reach a strange chapter in the middle of the book, which narrates the night before a critical surgery. This chapter is written in third-person singular voice, which would be unremarkable in any other book. In this case, it’s used to give us a very close-up and intimate view of her fears, ambitions, insecurities, and deepest desires. The third-person voice draws us closer to Lynn, but still at some remove - after all, it’s not first-person singular. My view is that Lynn is meant to be something like a god. After all, she is responsible for firing people, and layoffs are compared to death countless times throughout the book. (It’s also no coincidence, I think, that the only person in the book who can actually talk to her is named Pope.) She makes decisions that are a matter of life and death, and of course she herself is dying of an ill-defined but unstoppable cancer. Viewed in the larger metaphor of the story, I think that Lynn’s health is not so much a statement about religion exactly, but rather about what has been called our civil religion: American exceptionalism and uniqueness. If national unity was the bedrock upon which our exceptionalism was founded, and that unity is ending - then no wonder that we are no longer as exceptional as we once were. And what’s more, the best we can seem to do about this slow fading away of our national character is to try to convince ourselves that it’s funny, as the characters in this book try so hard to do.

I recommend this book very emphatically - I think that whatever dare inspired it, the author succeeded wonderfully. It’s a really funny, but also very profound and troubling look at our society, and how far we’ve come since one defining moment at the beginning of the century.