When I first reached Joshua Ferris to talk to him for the Barnes & Noble Review, my call surprised him. “I’m driving!” he said, and before he got pulled over for using his cell phone, we arranged to talk the following day. Crossed wires, publicists, scheduling – it happens. Anyway, our subsequent, not-driving conversation — in which he talks about the ideas underlying his new novel, The Unnamed — is now online. The protagonist of The Unnamed, a very successful NY attorney, is afflicted by a disease that has no known diagnosis. Here’s a bit of Ferris:
It seems to me that when a scientist or a medical doctor or a philosopher says, well, Descartes is over, the mind/body problem has been solved and we know that everything is located in the brain and we should celebrate, it seems to have missed the point. We don’t yet have subtle enough tools to alleviate all suffering, and the mystery is far too great – the confoundedness of disease; it brings me back to the soliloquy in Hamlet, “What a piece of work is man.”At the end of it, he says, “to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” There are two poles — one says we’re just this machine, and the other says, what a piece of work is man. I did not want to come down on one side or the other. It’s possible that this poor guy, with enough research and enough time, could have solved his problem — but essentially, the mystery at the heart of his entire being can never be solved….
That was my greatest hope for the book – that it came to a place where the most pressing questions about what it means to be human, what it means to be heroic in the face of evisceration, and whether or not this particular character could muster the resources to do something in spite of his illness. All of these things became pertinent. I kept going back to the quote by Albert Camus, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” That was a kind of challenge, as I was writing the book, because clearly this is kind of Sisyphean disease — its very recurrent nature makes it such. I had to wonder, Is this particular man going to find a way to be happy? And what is it going to be about – his career, his physical comfort, his family?
Tod Goldberg has just reviewed the book for the LA Times. “The Unnamed is an accomplished and daring work,” he writes, “by a writer just now realizing what he is capable of creating”
