To Rise Again At A Decent Hour

I have a love-hate relationship with contemporary American fiction.  I can get wrapped up in a book.  But I tend to like books that are set in the here and now and comment on our times.  (Science fiction and fantasy can do this, but I generally find that they function more as timeless parables, or, worse, fetishizations of distant lands and magical peoples.)  The trouble is that most authors who write in the here and now can see nothing but the here and now.  The worlds they create are identical to our own.  They end up writing about the same old things: struggling marriages, tumultuous relationships with parents, lasting friendships.

Joshua Ferris does not have this problem.  He knows how to take our world, look at it from a slightly different angle, and find a fresh perspective.  He's still best known, justifiably, for his debut novel, "Then We Came to the End," a book about an office written in first person plural.  His second book, "The Unnamed," concerned a man who suddenly began going into trances, walking for miles with no purpose.

His latest, "To Rise Again At A Decent Hour," follows Paul O'Rourke, a dentist whose identity is "stolen" online.  Someone creates a website for Paul's business.  Then creates a Facebook page.  Then a Twitter account.  Then an e-mail address.

There are a lot of interesting things one could do with this conceit.  Curiously, though, Ferris seems to lose interest in it.  Of course, the ironies of e-mailing to yourself are not lost on him.  But he's more concerned with his protagonist than his predicament.  O'Rourke seems to be in the midst of an existential crisis.  He's a dentist who's struggling to convince himself that it matters whether his patients floss.  As the book flows along, it becomes increasingly clear that he's the perfect target for a cult, which appears to be what's behind the appropriation of his identity.

But Ferris zigs when you expect him to zag.  There's a minor character in the book, Pete Mercer, who happens to be a billionaire.  I figured this would come in handy at some point, that O'Rourke would need assistance from someone with unlimited funds.  But Mercer's money is just a demonstration of his own crisis; he can do whatever he wants, except come up with a reason to do it.

Ferris sets the book entirely in O'Rourke's head, and there's not much in the way of incident.  Things can drag a little; Ferris is basically driving the book purely with his own intellect.  But along the way, he finds a nuanced take on the search for meaning and faith in the modern age.