Book 3 - Then We Came to the End

Then We Came to the End is set in an advertising office just after the dot com crash in the early 2000s. But this is not what the book is about.

The story is related from a 1st person plural point of view, from the collective. Everything is about us. We heard the boss has breast cancer. We knew that Amber was sleeping with Larry. We figured Tom would be the first to be let go. I rather enjoyed it. It certainly gave the author a lot of freedom to jump around without much continuity interruption.

The telling of events skips back and forth through time, in a Catch-22 style narrative (as described by other reviewers since I have yet to read Catch-22). Along this ride, the interests and fears of each character are revealed mostly through casual meetings in the office and in the manner of "I heard from Amy, who heard from Jim...". The author skillfully navigates through these fragmented anecdotes with liberal usage of nested quotations and mixing tenses within a single paragraph. For instance, the story will open up using the past perfect ("Benny had said"), followed by a switch to strictly past tense ("Roland looked"), incorporating present and future tenses within the lines of conversation between the players involved in the story. For me, it did what I imagined the author intended; it took me smoothly through the different timelines, making me feel that I was traveling into each characters head.

Ultimately, this story is about the camaraderie that develops in an office setting (which I believe to be transferable throughout any set of human interactions). As the proverbial walls are falling down around this group of office administrators, copyrighters, and graphic designers, each member of the team looks to find a balance between preserving their dignity and preserving their job. After each character's inevitable layoff, many lament about losing not just an income, but the sense of belonging to a community. Between the two parts of the book, there is an interlude describing how the partner in charge of the office is dealing with a diagnosis of breast cancer. It makes a great transition in the story to the personal and emotional problems faced by each character as their world crumbles around them.