The Unnamed

Tim Farnsworth, husband, father and successful lawyer at a prominent New York firm, is beset with a puzzling affliction: At any moment, no matter what he is doing, he is seized by an uncontrollable urge to walk. The urges last for several hours, even days. They come and go at whim, taking him away from the bourgeois trappings of his suburban home with wife and daughter, and the criminal cases he wins for his clients. He lands, physically depleted and half-conscious, next to dumpsters behind New Jersey restaurants or African hair salons in South Bronx.

The Farnsworths, a prototypical upper-middle class couple, visit doctors, alternative healing gurus, and shamans in an attempt to treat Tim’s condition. But despite their best attempts, the unnamed affliction continues, undaunted. In the freezing winter, Tim’s extremities fall off one by one, his skin becomes blighted by winds, his domestic life decimates, and his professional reputation falters.

What begins as a stab at speculative fiction in The Unnamed turns into a dry pastoral about modern life, a meditation of man without context. It’s a fantastic conceit, though there are times, as each meandering walk is faithfully chronicled, when you wonder whether this couldn’t have been handled in a short story. What keeps the novel afloat are the same writerly charms Ferris showed in his debut, Then We Came to the End, a satire of office politics at a Chicago ad agency.

In that first novel, as in his second, there’s a clear, precise attunation to yuppie life, from the passive aggression of routine office exchanges to the brand names his characters are outfitted in. Ferris’s low-key, clerical prose runs the risk of becoming perfunctory, but it is often punctuated with the odd witticism and surprising poetic license (“Horses ran through his brain the minute his head hit the pillow”) that show an emphatic, humanist sensibility. So we read on, hoping for some kind of absolution for his characters.