Do you remember a couple posts back, I said that I had just finished reading Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris? Well, Thursday, I went onto timeoutny.com because I'm getting a little stir crazy working only two days a week, and what's on the front page of the book section? That's right: Joshua Ferris book signing Friday night.
So I went to Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, which is this nice little shop with a modern look (clean white shelves and those dangling bulb lights). I get there 15 minute early and all the seats are already occupied. By the time 7:30 rolled around, there were probably about 50 people there--a very good turn out for 17 degrees and viciously windy.
Joshua Ferris came in and read two sections from his new novel, The Unnamed. This book is said to be as good as the first book, but very different. It is a more serious book about a lawyer who has an illness that causes him to sometimes start walking unable to stop himself until his feet literally can no longer take it. This affects his career and his relationships with his wife and daughter.
Ferris read what he said are the funny parts of the book, despite it being overall a more serious book. And they were certainly funny parts! One was a story about a rich man who cannot have sex unless there is a deadly snake in the room, a fetish that ends up getting a prostitute killed.
During the Q&A, Ferris said that he is not an outliner because if he comes to the page knowing what he wants to write, the chasm between what he wants to say and what he actually writes is so vast that he feels like doing horrible things to himself. It was refreshing to hear someone say that because, though I've never put it into words, I know this chasm well!
About The Unnamed, he says that the trigger was walking. He knew the book would be about someone walking before he knew anything else about the book. This is a nod to the romantic poets (I assume Thoreau can be counted among them, though he didn't name him). A very English passtime, walking.
He also talked about character development in Then We Came to the End. He met the characters as they appeared on the page, just as the readers do. Whenever he needed a name, he'd come up with something and then write the name in the back of the notebook (He writes long hand too!) for later reference. The characters are so well developed, I wouldn't have guessed at his method.
After the reading and Q&A, there was a book signing. Thankfully Ferris is one of those authors who seems, and likely does, genuinely want to be there. There are author signings I've been to where you can tell the author is tired or not really listening to you or was made to do this by someone else. But he was conversational. I bought his second book and got it signed. We talked about the spelling of my name and how I'd first run across his book at NYU.
