Oeuvre rule: Joshua Ferris has a manageable bibliography. He has 5 books, and I have now read 2 of them. Whether I read the other three (two novels--To Rise Again at a Decent Hour and The Unnamed--and a short story collection--The Dinner Party) is an open question. Of course, his debut, Then We Came to End, was a borderline selection for the Best Books list here, and while it is still his most famous book, his other work has also been honored, to varying degrees.
For some reason, I didn't hear as much about those other books (maybe their plotlines or themes defied easier categorization) as I did about A Calling for Charlie Barnes, or his debut. I could point specifically to an article I read on my phone, in the lobby of a hotel in Rome, on or around August 14th, waiting for a driver to take us back to the airport, which also listed The Magician and I Wished as novels to anticipate in the Fall of 2021. I added those to my Holds list at CPL, along with this book, which I imagined was getting more publicity because it was a "comeback" of sorts for Ferris. As for a final assessment, it is not as good as either of those books (though it was brisker than The Magician, it took me almost twice as long, perhaps due to other distressing elements in my life, which made me care less about literature), nor is it better than Then We Came to the End. It is, however, a very interesting book "philosophically" that turns into a certain puzzle for the reader, and legitimately surprised me. I cannot say I loved it, but it did cause me to reflect upon the nature of art, truth, storytelling, and how we choose our subjects.
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The first thing to mention is the opening, because it shoots out of the gates like a rocket. The first 30 pages set an impossibly high bar for comedy, and what follows is a convoluted history of a man and his various wives and the family that springs up around.
It feels telling when the book uses, as its epigraph, the acknowledgements page from The Glass Castle. Now I have not read that book, but I know it was very popular many years ago and is about a crazy family with an abusive (alcoholic?) father. Of course, the acknowledgements thank everyone in the family except the father, and so one may conclude this, too, will be a story about a bad father.
The father in question is Charlie Barnes, who is 68 years old in the Fall of 2008, where the novel begins. Once again, because a thorough examination of the book requires a discussion of spoilers, that section of the review will be denoted below. There are, in fact, 68 chapters in this book. The "turn" of the book happens around page 200, chapter 43, and the "second turn" comes at the very end, around page 329 and Chapter 67. Thus, everything after page 200 should be withheld from the reader. But the first part of the book feels less interesting to discuss.
Because this is a character study, and it seems to be about Charlie Barnes, and Charlie Barnes alone. But then we realize that his family is rather expansive and confusing, owing to the five wives, and the narrator soon becomes slightly cheeky, until we find that this is a book being written by Jake Barnes, youngest son of Charlie Barnes, and something of a foster kid, which continued to confuse me (perhaps the child of an ex-wife with a different father, that Charlie treats as his own).
Charlie believes he has cancer and is something a hypochondriac. Bear Stearns has recently declared bankruptcy, and because he worked there in the 1980s, he tries to contact an old colleague, while railing against their former boss. He tells everyone he has pancreatic cancer and that it is basically a death sentence, and excruciatingly painful, so he sets out to put his affairs in order, it seems. Charle is a very disillusioned figure who has come up with half a dozen business ideas, all of which are enormous failures, and who cannot not stick with a job for more than a few months or a year at best. His career is a mish-mash of failed dreams, and he has settled into a sort of niche as a financial advisor and fiduciary for the investments of a small number of clients, one of which has just died, whose son wants $10,000 of unpaid proceeds from the account.
He makes these phone calls, and yes, the beginning of the book is fantastic, broadly comic and charismatic. But soon Charlie learns that he does not, in fact, have cancer, and he has told his children that he does, and then has to consider telling them he was wrong, and they consider him a liar, and then he does, actually, have cancer (certainly The Royal Tenenbaums cannot be the only story to utilize this trope, but it is the first thing that comes to mind--but Charlie is no Royal).
***
Really, it is just the phone calls at the beginning that set the tone, such as when he tries to call his daughter Marcy, finds her unavailable at the office, and talks to her colleague Bethany, asking if she knew anything about pancreatic cancer:
"'I don't know anything about it,' she said.
'Well, I can tell you this: it's not good. People with pancreatic cancer go to their graves as if shot out of a cannon, okay? Hospital personnel can hardly collect a gurney quickly enough to send that particular patient off to hospice care before he keels over right there in the lobby of the hospital. You want to know what it's like?'
There was a long pause.
'I'm sorry, are you asking--'
'It's like priority mail,' he said. 'It gets you where you're going faster than the other methods, but you have to pay extra--in fear, I mean, and the surprise factor, and physical devastation. There's no time to make amends or settle your accounts. You just die.'
'I will be sure to give Marcy this message right away,' Bethany said." (19)
This is in "Farce, or 105 Rust Road," which is what we expect the novel to be--that is, this plot of "I have cancer, I don't have cancer, I have cancer,"--and is 175 pages long. From there, it goes to "While Under," which is relatively short, about 20 pages, and then there is "Fiction, or 906 Harmony Drive," which is about 125 pages, and then "The Facts," which is about 20 pages. So, there are 4 big chapters, basically, and the opening is very good, and while there is a real payoff at the ending, I cannot say it ends on a high note. The ending "redeems" the book and renders it much more meaningful, though it doesn't transform the book into a masterpiece, necessarily, just a very strong "position statement" of sorts, an unveiling of a r'aison d'etre, and I see I am becoming vague and unmoored, so we should just talk about the ending and segregate that section of the review with double asterisks, so you are doubly aware not to read below, unless that sort of thing doesn't bother you
***
***
So, there is obviously a big twist in this book that happens somewhere around the surgery scene of "While Under," and what happens in "Fiction, or 906 Harmony Drive." So right there, Ferris is basically telling the reader what he is doing, but they probably will not be aware until "The Facts." This is probably the deftest move in the book, where even a seemingly impossible turnaround is rendered totally believable. Maybe I am naive or stupid, but I believed it was real. I'm curious about other people, and I feel like I am not alone, here. Basically, the reader does not yet realize the book is something of a puzzle until the end, and that was not apparent to me (the only "puzzle" was assembling their family tree).
By the time of "The Facts," the truth is something of a letdown, but it elevates the book into the "noteworthy" category (better than merely "enjoyable," yet not a "masterpiece."). Because the issues the ending addresses are absolutely essential to the nature of literature, they are worth considering.
In short, we find that the "Fiction" chapter is, in fact, fiction. Charlie does not live long past the procedure known as the "Whipple" (an emergency last minute measure to physically remove cancer that may have already metastasized), maybe a number of hours, whereas "Fiction" shows him in a long recovery period, then finally being reinvigorated by his business idea "Chippin' In," which is a kind of Kickstarter-esque venture, while his wife Barbara the nurse starts medical school in her late 40's, jumping ahead to 2016 when Charles is in his late 70's and now rich and successful, and by this point Jake has also finished a draft of this book, and an electronic version has been leaked to members of the family who question his adherence to reality.
While this is certainly an incredible chain of events, and an odd way of invoking metafiction, I was not incredulous, I bought it. There is even a reference to 2020, with Charlie's older brother Rudy dying of Covid-19, and Charlie still alive at 81, but then all of that is decimated, and Ferris plays with his own persona:
"Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid book. Time to wrap things up, give thanks, move on. Important to move on. Fail to move on, you die. Wouldn't want that. Wouldn't want to linger or dwell. No living in the past, either. That's right, let it go. if the past is full of bitterness, the future is always bright. Right? How good does this feel? Eh? Feels pretty good, am I right?" (329)
"The Facts" serves as a true acknowledgments section as well as an author's note--but is it, in fact, true? There is probably some fact to it (on his wikipedia page, it does say that Ferris was born in Danville, IL, which is one of the major settings over the course of the book) but just as much twisting of reality.
So, we don't quite know how much stock to put into passages such as the following, which is on the second-to-last page of the book:
"I began writing this book in 2009, in the thick of grief. A year later, I'd taken the facts as far as they would go--up to the day of his surgery. For the next ten years, I banged my head bloody against a wall of truth, searching for a way out. There was none--unless I defied his request that I stick to the facts and got a little fancy, gave him the ending he deserved. If he was not the angel Barbara believed him to be, he was a better man than most people knew. Suddenly, the color came back to me, the music resumed. It was the end of grief. I could play again. He's right: it's a silly occupation for a grown man. I had bowed out of an impossible situation, but without losing my mind. Turns out, he was my calling." (341-342)
But it seems pretty clear this book is an exercise in grief. We do not know if Charlie Barnes, or Steady Boy, was really Ferris's father. Excuse me, he is the father of Jake Barnes, which is also the main character from a famous novel by Ernest Hemingway, an author with an award named for him that Ferris has received. Hemingway is invoked at one other point in the narrative, but there is nothing of his literary style here. No, but Hemingway was born in Oak Park, IL, and this novel lives in the western suburbs of Chicago. It reminded me of my father too, born not far from there and not much younger than Charlie Barnes, working in the financial industry, similarly re-inventing himself (but not with the "Doolander" or "Clown in Your Town," or four additional marriages). There is something in the character of that locale in that era that felt shared. Invoking that deeper truth about humanity--through this sort of very specific psychological profile--is one of the greatest successes an author can attain.
So yes, this book is flawed, and so is the character of Charlie Barnes. If Ferris is truly writing a tribute to his father, it is about as fine as one could expect. It's not a hagiography, and plenty of people seem only to see the flaws in Charlie, but Jake sees him as a whole person, and one that had an almost uniformly positive effect on him. Perhaps he was not the greatest husband, or the greatest father or role model, but still at the end of the day, he was a good father when it mattered. And so it is with this book, when the ending finally comes.
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