The Unnamed

If Joshua Ferris' first book took a while to grab me (and ultimately, won me over), his second novel, The Unnamed, had me, and then lost me somewhere west of the Rocky Mountains. Initially, Ferris portrays Tim's disease as a tragic disruption of everyday life. A high-powered attorney, Tim walks out in the middle of trial. His wanderings force his wife, Jane, to scour area hospitals and police stations, searching for her wayward husband. He undergoes bizarre tests that leave him home alone watching TV with his overweight, distant daughter. The books begins as a portrait of privileged, suburban life, disrupted by the suddenness of illness. Tim's body does dangerous, unhealthy things he cannot understand; his condition throws his life into chaos.

Tim's walking doesn't differ much from Jane's cancer. At the end of the novel, Jane's body does dangerous, unhealthy things she can barely understand; her condition throws her life into chaos (as does her earlier alcoholism, which she overcomes). Ferris, therefore, employs his characters in an examination of disease itself. From where does "disease" originate? How do you determine if someone is "sick"? How does the mind affect the body, and the body affect the mind? The novel's outcome suggests that the body and mind depend on each other in order to coexist, but as opposing forces that often enter into conflict, and only occasionally, cohesion.

My issue with the novel lies with Ferris' exclusive focus on Tim for the last third of the book. Earlier sections allow us into the minds of Jane and Becka, thus placing Tim's experience in a larger context. Ferris drops the women's points of view in order to delve deep into Tim's mental instability (does the walking drive Tim to insanity or does Tim walk because he is insane?), and in doing so, the story loses much of its familiarity. Tim is an obviously sick man, eventually left to wander the country in acceptance of his condition. Passing lines refer to Becka's wedding, the birth of her child, and Jane's new partner, but how did the women feel in those moments? Did they accept Tim's absence, miss him? Ferris leaves these questions unanswered.

This is a story about being sick, but it's also a story about the duality within us all. We have all ignored hunger in order to take an important call, exhausted ourselves to finish studying for an exam, or ignored an oncoming cold to go out with friends; we have all experienced moments where our physical and mental selves fail to coexist. Joshua Ferris would have you believe that such struggles define our lives, that we rarely maintain both sound body and mind. Of course, to reach that conclusion, Ferris creates a character so unwell, it's hard to argue the opposition.